Ethereum (COIN: ETHUSD) co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in a Dec. 19 interview with Bankless that Ripple’s XRP “remains quite centralized.”
According to Buterin, for a project to be part of the cryptographic space, it needs to use cryptography and have “some kind of on-chain data structure somewhere.”
He added that XRP did not apologize for writing to the US government that Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum are assets controlled by China.
“XRP has not apologized for claiming that Bitcoin and Ethereum are controlled by China.”
Ripple’s CTO reacts
In response, Ripple CTO David Schwartz criticized Buterin for not knowing the difference between Ripple and XRP.
Schwartz tweeted that Buterin “still doesn’t understand, or pretends not to, that Ripple is a company and XRP is a digital asset.”
Meanwhile, this is not the first time Buterin has infuriated the XRP community. Earlier this year, he said that XRP had lost its right to be protected from the cryptocurrency community because Ripple claimed that Ethereum was controlled by China.
The Ripple community has claimed that Ethereum got a free pass from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) due to corruption.
Are Buterin’s centrist claims true?
The relationship between XRP and Ripple has led to persistent claims from the crypto community that the digital asset is centralized.
While Ripple is a crypto payments company focused on enterprise blockchain technology, XRP (COIN: XRPUSD) is the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) network. According to its website, XRPL is “based on a consensus mechanism that is democratic in nature — and cannot be controlled by any party.”
The available information also shows that Ripple controls only 4 of the more than 130 validators that run XRPL.
Critics also tend to point out that Ripple owns the majority of the XRP token. However, its latest report stated that the company’s XRP holdings have fallen to less than 50% of the total supply. The company added that every validator on its network “gets one vote, regardless of how much XRP they own.”
With information from CryptoSlate