Bitcoiners attack Ripple after Strategic Bitcoin Reserve flop

Following Ripple’s successful political activism via Fairshake and its other Washington DC lobbying efforts, its critics are reinvigorated.

After it scored a victory in Donald Trump’s executive order that deprioritized bitcoin (BTC) and emphasized stablecoins like Ripple USD, Bitcoiners have focused their vitriol on the billionaire-led company for allegedly derailing plans for a US National Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

Leading the attack is Riot Platforms’ Pierre Rochard, a Bitcoin maximalist. Leading the defense is Ripple CTO David Schwartz, who has fired back against Rochard’s claims that the $XRP Ledger (XRPL) blockchain is centralized.

Behind them, thousands of the communities’ supporters are rallying support for their causes.

For example, Rochard retweeted a thread describing XRPL as being centrally administered by Ripple Labs. The thread highlights a legal notice from Ripple asserting that it and its logo are trademarked. Rochard went on to make the case that $XRP is a differentiated product like Kleenex or Evian, not a commodity like cotton or water.

Schwartz tried to claim that any theoretical trademark on $XRP, the native coin of the $XRP Ledger, would not be easy to enforce. He also claimed that Ripple does not compensate validators.

Rochard claims that Ripple still has outsized control over the $XRP Ledger, including reserving the right to determine which chain would maintain the $XRP ticker symbol if a contentious hard fork were to occur. Ripple Labs also doesn’t permit anyone to use its trademarked materials.

Ripple’s Unique Node Lists (UNLs)

Although anyone may run an $XRP validator, they have to be included on Unique Node Lists (UNLs) maintained by Ripple and entities with financial ties to Ripple to have influence in the practical validation of $XRP Ledger transactions.

According to Rochard, this casts Schwartz’s claim that XRPL is decentralized into doubt since Ripple and associated parties can change the UNLs or refuse to add a new validator. Rochard called this power “a massive conflict of interest.”

Read more: Ripple billionaires’ $RLUSD captures less than 0.04% of stablecoin market

For its Initial Coin Offering (ICO), Ripple co-founders pre-mined 100 billion coins and allocated more than half to a small group of insiders and entities that they led. Today, Ripple insiders continue to control or lead entities that control a large percentage of the $XRP supply.

Unlike the Bitcoin community, Ripple has pushed for stablecoins like its $RLUSD and even its Ripple CBDC Platform for non-USD fiat stablecoins.

Ripple’s USD stablecoin $RLUSD launched last month and hasn’t increased in size for weeks. As of publication time, its market capitalization hasn’t increased from its $73 million since CoinGecko started tracking it on December 23, 2024.

For context, $RLUSD is less than 0.04% of the stablecoin market.

The animosity between Bitcoin maximalists and Ripple is famous, and the duel between Rochard and Schwartz is just the latest episode in a long history of fights between the two camps.

Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen personally paid millions of dollars for a Change the Code media campaign that attacked Bitcoin’s implementation of proof-of-work.