XRP is ‘absolutely not’ controlled by Ripple, says CTO David Schwartz

[Pegasus]

Ripple and XRP have been in the news multiple times recently, mainly because of its updates and developments. The company and the cryptocurrency were also helped along the way by many luminaries in the Ripple fold, with Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz and CEO Brad Garlinghouse being the prime examples.

In a new Quora post, David Schwartz went on to answer the age-old question of whether Ripple controls XRP or not. He started by saying:

“Absolutely not. The XRP Ledger is open source technology with a robust community of developers, so if Ripple were to vanish, XRP and the XRP Ledger will remain. By design, XRP is an independent digital asset and transactions are validated in a completely decentralized manner through the consensus process – which means the stakeholders in the network are the ones who collectively power the transactions, not any individual or entity.”

The CTO claimed that the reason why some people think Ripple owns XRP stems from a few basic misunderstandings that were prevalent within the community. Schwartz went on to clarify the characteristics that differentiate XRP from Ripple. He touched on the difference of Utility between XRP and Ripple and claimed that XRP was currently used for payments, which would continue to exist with or without Ripple.

Schwartz’s second pointer was ‘ownership’, which he described as:

“XRP doesn’t represent a share of Ripple. If you own XRP, you don’t own any part of Ripple, the company.”

His third and final differentiator between Ripple and XRP was the concept of decentralization. The computer scientist stated that Ripple did not control the vast majority of validators which serve as a “robust ecosystem to validate transactions on the XRP Ledger”. He also informed users that Ripple only controlled seven of the total 150 XRP validators.

Schwartz added that while Ripple does own a portion of XRP, the control on transactions was still with the validators ie. even Ripple’s transactions would be checked by the designated validators. He went on to say:

“At the end of 2017, the company placed 55 billion of the XRP it owns into a cryptographically-secured escrow account. This squashes any concern that Ripple would flood the market with XRP at once – which, by the way, would not be good for us either.”

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