Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz says the company is making “strategic adjustments” in an effort to bring the benefits of XRP technology to a wider swath of the population.
A Twitter user recently grilled Schwartz, one of the original architects of the XRP Ledger, about Ripple being “aligned” with big corporations rather than the “common man.”
“The challenge for Ripple; RippleX; XRPL Foundation… is to enable the common man to avoid getting shafted by the ‘system’. I see little progress in this regard. The SWIFT SDK is exceedingly limited. There are more than 200 open issues in Github for RippleD.”
Schwartz maintains XRP’s systems are open to everyone and unable to be controlled by established institutions. Still, he acknowledges things haven’t been perfect.
“We’re mostly working from the other direction – getting enterprises and institutions to use (indirectly, usually) systems that are open to everyone and can’t be controlled by anyone. That will add more value to those open systems, driving more people to them.
But this has yielded results more slowly than we had hoped. Hence, the strategic adjustments with things like Xpring and RippleX. We are trying to do more.”
Ripple recently rebranded its XRP investment and development arm Xpring as “RippleX.”
Schwartz also maintains Ripple doesn’t want to align themselves with any entity or institution pushing for bans on certain blockchains or private financial solutions. Rather, he says, they favor a “robust and healthy” blockchain ecosystem.
He also says they support Bitcoin.
“We all love Bitcoin. We ‘go after it’ only for two reasons. One is to fairly level set comparisons with XRPL features and technology and the other is where there’s regulatory favoritism.
I don’t believe any cryptocurrency or blockchain project can succeed by tearing others down. Just as Internet companies need a healthy Internet ecosystem with lots of successful players, so do blockchain companies.”
Ripple advertises XRP’s faster transaction settlement time than Bitcoin, as well as its sustainability.
Featured Image: Shutterstock/Georgii Shipin