Vitalik Buterin says XRP is ‘completely centralized,’ Ripple CTO reacts

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin in a Dec. 19 interview with Bankless, said Ripple’s XRP “was still completely centralized.”

According to Buterin, for a project to be a part of the crypto space, it needs to use cryptography and have “some kind of chain data structure somewhere.”

He added that XRP hasn’t apologized for writing to the U.S. government that Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum were Chinese-controlled assets.

“XRP has not apologized for claiming that Bitcoin and Ethereum are Chinese-controlled.”

Ripple CTO reacts

In response, Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz criticized Buterin for not knowing the difference between Ripple and XRP.

Schwartz tweeted that Buterin “still doesn’t understand, or is pretending not to understand, that Ripple is a company and XRP is a digital asset.”

Meanwhile, this is not the first time that Buterin will draw the ire of the XRP community. Earlier this year, he said XRP had lost its right to protection from the crypto community because Ripple claimed China controlled Ethereum.

Ripple’s community alleged that Ethereum got a free pass from the Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC) because of corruption.

Is Buterin’s centralization claims right?

The relationship between XRP and Ripple has led to continued allegations from the crypto community that the digital asset is centralized.

While Ripple is a crypto payment company focused on blockchain technology for institutions, XRP is the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) network. According to its website, XRPL is “based on an inherently decentralized, democratic, consensus mechanism — which no one party can control.”

Available information also shows that Ripple controls only 4 of the over 130 validators running XRPL.

Critics also tend to point out that Ripple holds most of the XRP token. However, its recent report stated that the firm’s XRP holdings have declined below 50% of its total supply. The firm added that each validator on its network “gets one vote regardless of how much XRP they own.”