Ripple has been criticized for being centralized for years now. In fact, many critics have gone as far as calling XRP a fake cryptocurrency because even though XRP does use the blockchain technology, all existing coins were pre-mined at the beginning. The majority of XRP tokens are still in the hands of the Ripple creators and the company itself.
Back in 2018, David Schwartz, the Chief Technology Officer of Ripple Labs wrote and published an article titled ‘The Inherently Decentralized Nature of XRP Ledger’ explaining why XRP is far more decentralized than other cryptocurrencies.
Unfortunately, blockchain experts seem to agree that XRP is not really decentralized, in fact, Matt McKibbin, the founder of Decentranet told CCN that the digital asset is wholly centralized.
How is Marcus Treacher Defending Ripple?
Treacher has been defending Ripple and XRP for quite some time stating several times that XRP is not centralized. “It’s a decentralized, open-source digital asset, and the XRP Ledger is based on an inherently decentralized, democratic, consensus mechanism — meaning no one party can control it, not even Ripple.” Commented Treacher.
Treacher also points out that the XRP coins held by the team of Ripple are locked inside a secure escrow account which releases XRP each month. However, on January 31, 2019, the team of Ripple announced that the deletable accounts feature would be coming soon to the XRP ledger.
A lot of people expressed some concern over the feature as it would allow accounts to be removed entirely from the ledger and recover ‘most of the reserve locked in the accounts for spam prevention’. Treacher stated that while this would indeed be possible, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing for the XRP ecosystem.
Ripple is Now The Second-Largest Fintech Firm in the US
The criticism hasn’t stopped Ripple and XRP from moving forward. Just last month, Forbes has named Ripple the second-largest fintech firm in the US. Much of the growth that Ripple has been experiencing happened thanks to the company’s focus on the international transaction market.
“A large part of our success has been to not lose focus on solving a specific problem around cross border payments,” he said–particularly, the global remittance market.” Said Marcus Treacher.
