Ripple Manager: If XRP is a bank coin – then Bitcoin is a drug dealer coin

The legal battle between the US Securities and Exchange Commission and Ripple Labs over the role of XRP has generated a lot of comment in the past few months. While some see the SEC‘s action against XRP as justified, many others criticize it: The SEC has put its unequal treatment of cryptocurrencies under evidence. In fact, many players in the crypto industry are convinced that the Commission is deliberately protecting popular coins such as Bitcoin and Ethereum while it takes action against others.

Ripple Labs manager criticizes unequal treatment by the SEC

In a recent interview , Ripple’s developer relations director Matt Hamilton also pointed out this inequality by the SEC. He was referring to the director of the corporate finance department, William Hinman. He claimed that Hinman in particular acted in the same way.

In addition, Hamilton commented on the various stereotypes related to XRP. For example, he claimed that XRP had no intrinsic value. He said XRP is mostly viewed as a “banker’s coin” focused on serving the interests of financial institutions. In addition, many customers did not see the coin as a “real” cryptocurrency. That’s largely due to claims made about its developers, some of whom say XRP developers are more focused on the ledger than the cryptocurrency itself.

Regarding the XRP ledger, Hamilton said that the ledger stores the complete status of every account on the network in every block. Financial institutions like Santander Bank and American Express were the first to adopt the XRP coin. This came before the institutions’ massive interest in Bitcoin. In an interview, Hamilton said:

“If you refer to XRP as bank coin, then Bitcoin is drug dealer coin … as a percentage of total supply, more Bitcoin is held by banks than XRP is held by banks in the same period of time.”

Institutions hold less than one percent of XRP

Hamilton went on to talk about the double standards of BTC fans glorifying Bitcoin’s institutional use case and investments, while criticizing XRP for the exact same reason. Institutional investors currently hold around 8% of Bitcoin holdings, but their exposure to XRP is less than 1%.

In addition, Hamilton spoke about the classification of XRP as “decentralized”. First, the cryptocurrency is completely pre-mined and has no mining mechanism. Above all, Ripple owns a large amount of the entire XRP inventory. The difference between centralization and decentralization is very subjective. Hamilton stated:

“Ripple owned and operated about 5% of the nodes in the XRP ledger … that doesn’t give them any power over the XRP ledger. If the community decides that they actually want a change to the XRP ledger, that would effectively burn Ripple’s XRP. ”