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- XRP, the fourth-largest cryptocurrency, and its governance are once again a topic of discussion on X.
- The network’s CTO, David Schwartz, stepped in to respond to John Puruntong, saying that XRP has no issuer.
Ripple, the company behind XRP, runs only one of over 150 validators on the XRP Ledger. That means it cannot unilaterally control or manipulate the ledger. To make changes to the ledger, like upgrades or protocol changes, 80% of validators must agree, and that consensus must remain stable for two weeks.
This explains that Ripple is not centralized. However, the crypto community thinks otherwise. John Puruntong went on to X to question, ” If XRP is decentralized, then why is Garlinghouse the face of it and Ripple the issuer? I don’t see the same arrangement with BTC.”
How XRP Ledger’s Governance Works
In response to this, Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, responded with,
Garlinghouse is the CEO of Ripple, a company. XRP has no issuer — all the XRP that will ever exist was created when the ledger was created. Unlike most other blockchains, XRPL has no rivalrous features, so the ledger itself can’t really do the initial distribution beyond letting anyone who wants to take as much XRP as they want.
Unlike most crypto projects that mint tokens over time or release them through mining or staking, all 100 billion XRP units were created at the very beginning, when the XRP Ledger went live in 2012. No new XRP will ever be created. This is very different from, for example, Bitcoin (BTC), which is mined over time, or Ethereum (ETH), which issues new ETH as part of its proof-of-stake (PoS) validation. This fixed supply model makes XRP deflationary in nature, particularly since a small amount of XRP is burned with every transaction.
As for thinking about whether XRPL is decentralized, I would suggest thinking for a few minutes about why you care whether a ledger is decentralized. Ask yourself what you want to be assured will happen and what you want to be assured won’t happen.
Some critics argue that XRP isn’t truly decentralized because Ripple holds a large amount of XRP, played a major role in developing the XRP Ledger, and has connections to some of the default validator nodes. But holding a big stash of tokens doesn’t automatically mean control.
Most blockchains have incentives to attract early adopters, including miners, stakers, and airdrops. These are built into the protocol to spread tokens across a wide user base. But XRPL doesn’t have that. It was designed to be efficient and scalable, not to pay miners or validators with XRP.
As a result, it had no native mechanism to “distribute” the coins to a wide audience when it launched. Instead, the founders and early developers received large portions of XRP and donated or sold some over time to bootstrap the ecosystem. Over time, Ripple has been selling XRP to institutions and through exchanges, but under tight controls via escrow accounts that limit how much it can sell each month.
Amid these discussions, data from Polymarket has revealed that the chances of an XRP Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) receiving approval from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have increased by 13% over the last week, taking the approval chances to 83%.
As we covered in our latest report, XRP is expected to surge to $5 upon approval. Currently, XRP is down by 1.11% in the past 24 hours, to now be priced at $2.31.
