This Is The Most Polarizing Token in Crypto
A sleeping giant or a stable coin?
I have never seen a project divide people in the crypto community with such polarity. Those that love it, will not stop defending its utility. Those that don’t are ready to give the optimists tin foil hats, claiming the token is just a scam or a stable coin at best.
If you haven’t guessed it already, it’s Ripple XRP.
As polarizing as this token may be (and as much as I fall under one side of this polarity), my aim for this post is to be completely impartial; giving you the information you need to make your mind up and tell me how you feel about this token.
Arguments For
Ripple XRP boasts of having the fastest and cheapest solution available for cross-border payment transactions.
Utility
Unlike some tokens still in the development stages, Ripple XRP claims to have solved a gap in the market and can handle cross-border payments seamlessly. Ripple can successfully handle around 1,500 transactions per second. To compare this to Etherum and Bitcoin, they can currently only handle around 15 and up to 6 transactions per second respectively.
Apart from the impressive speed, Ripple also claims to be one of the most cost-effective solutions with the average transaction costing the user a fraction of a penny. This is incomparable to the exorbitant gas fees Ethereum currently charges.
XRP provides the liquidity required to perform such a volume of transactions with such low fees, giving it a great utility for the Ripple network.
Network
Ripple XRP also has some pretty big names as their customers including American Express and Santander.
Apart from their client list, the core team behind Ripple XRP have been in the spotlight numerous times (I’m sure more times than they would have liked, more on this in the next section). However, the most recent positive news comes from the team’s Senior Director of Product. He announced that he had been selected as the Vice-Chair of the US Faster Payments council for Cross Border Payments.
This might not mean much to those who aren’t keeping up with the headlines on XRP, but the next section could shed more light on why the news above might be an indicator of something else.
Arguments Against
To counteract the positives, these are the reasons why people don’t believe in the token or its future.
Centralization
On Ripple XRP’s website, it states that they are decentralized and run by over 150 distributors worldwide. However, most claim that XRP is in fact not decentralized.
Most say the company is very much operated as a centralized one. Many people also argue that Ripple, the company behind XRP, has over 51% of token shares. Although most of those shares are locked up in escrow, this can make many people feel uneasy as market manipulation by Ripple can be a real possibility.
Lawsuits
The SEC has filed a complaint against Ripple XRP and two of its executives claiming that XRP has been trading as an unregistered security in 2020. This has caused exchanges to delist XRP as a token that can be traded on their platforms.
The lawsuit has been filed in December of 2020, meaning the case has dragged on for about a year; leaving the future of XRP unknown and on hold. There have been several delays and requests to push deadlines with the hopes that the case will now be closed in Q1 of 2022.
This is the first case against a token in the crypto space of this magnitude. Which means it can easily be used as a precedent for many cases to come. I think anyone who understands this will hope for a positive resolution for XRP, regardless of how they feel about the token; given the results of this case will likely set the tone for crypto and crypto regulations in the future.
Anyone who has known of this token either loves it with unmatched loyalty or hates it with a passion — there’s no in-between. I’m curious to know where you stand in this debate. Is XRP a sleeping giant or just a stable coin?
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