Ripple CEO to Ethereum [ETH]’s Joseph Lubin: “Ripple is trying to lead by example”

Brad Garlinghouse, Brian Behlendorf, and Joseph Lubin spoke at a panel, Ethereal Davos and had a healthy debate about what decentralization means on January 23, 2019.

Brad Garlinghouse addressed the issue revolving XRP and it being “centralized” and said that XRP Ledger is more decentralized than its mining-based counterparts. He said:

“It’s [Ripple] not a Proof-of-Stake model, so owning a lot of something doesn’t give you control over something. The XRP Ledger is an open source decentralized technology, there’s about a 100 validators that manage the network. Ripple manages less than 5% of those nodes, and we cannot enforce upon the XRPL  anything that the XRPL doesn’t want to.”

He continued that there are holy wars, financial interests, and a lot of FUD around Ripple or the XRP Ledger. In addition, he said that people talk about XRP being centralized because they want to paint it that way.

Joseph Lubin stepped in at this point and decided to have a healthy debate with Garlinghouse. He asked Garlinghouse:

“XRP is a value token and it trades in an open market. If the CFTC  noticed that you own 60% of the silver token, how comfortable would they be?”

Garlinghouse replied:

“I won’t speak for the CFTC. We have in escrow 55% of all the XRP that we own. We can’t sell it, we can’t do anything with it… I think the, for the whole industry to mature we need to have transparency in the industry and Ripple is trying to lead by example.”

Lubin had a comeback to Garlinghouse’s “transparency” reply by saying that the other digital assets [like Ethereum] are decentralized in terms of the ownership of the token.

Garlinghouse said:

“Ownership of the token is decentralized in so far as they work on Proof-of-Stake… If its a mining based protocol then centralization is based on mining control and not on the ownership.”

@XRP_Ninja, a Twitter user commented:

“I never understood what was so wrong about Ripple selling their XRP. They own it. They can do with it what they like – not to mention that the selling of it actually has a purpose.”

Tiffany Hayden commented:

“Ripple is the only transparent company in the BLOCKCHAIN space and they are punished for it. We should follow Brad’s lead and turn the table on these other companies who hide in opacity. Oh! Let’s start a rating system!”