Crypto investors have registered more than a billion XRP to receive free Spark governance tokens from the crypto startup Flare.
Flare, a Ripple partner, says they will give out one free Spark governance token for every XRP held in a registered and eligible account when the startup takes a “snapshot” on December 12th. The account holders will not have to give up their XRP to receive the new tokens.
Nearly 20,000 accounts are now set up to receive Spark, with 1.11 billion XRP allocated in total, according to xrplorer.com. The largest XRP Ledger account currently holds about 168 million XRP.
Flare is bringing smart contracts to the XRP ecosystem. The company’s co-founder, Hugo Philion, explains in an interview with Crypto Eri that they want to make Ripple’s native asset more versatile.
“What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to essentially expand the use cases without affecting the XRP Ledger itself. So Flare will have minimal-to-no effect on the XRP Ledger. It’s just about transporting the value of XRP onto Flare and then it can be used with smart contracts in many different ways.
And smart contracts – all they are really are programs that run on a blockchain… [At] the moment, on say the XRP Ledger, you have a limited amount of things you can do with the XRP token, and that was a design decision, and that’s why XRP is so fast and so cheap to use. But with smart contracts, we can take XRP and we can do a lot more things with it.”
Philion says one of the use cases will be collateralizing the issuance of stablecoins, and he notes that they already have several parties interested in doing that.
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