Vitalik Buterin had to face the wrath of XRP community after stating XRP lost its right to protection
In a recent tweet, Vitalik Buterin claims that XRP lost its right to protection after Ripple attempted to throw Ethereum under the bus as “China-controlled.” At the same time, the Ethereum co-founder said that he was glad that people were pushing against regulations that prioritize Ethereum over other legitimate cryptocurrencies.
Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum
Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Riles Up XRP Community Once Again
His tweet came in response to Newton and Bitbuy, two Ontario, Canada-based cryptocurrency exchanges, enforcing an annual 30,000 CAD “buy limit” for all the available cryptocurrencies except for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and several other altcoins. “If they had restricted XRP I wouldn’t have said anything,” Bankless co-founder David Hoffman quipped.
Back in December 2020, Buterin slammed Ripple for “sinking to new levels of strangeness” by attempting to label Bitcoin and Ethereum as “China-controlled” just because the country accounted for the majority of the global hashrate. In April 2020, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen wrote an op-ed, in which he claims that Bitcoin could be potentially destroyed by the Communist Party of China. It is worth mentioning that the U.S. is currently the biggest Bitcoin mining hub. Buterin’s most recent anti-XRP comment attracted plenty of criticism from the token’s community.
Do you think this debate should be settled by the government or the market, @VitalikButerin? This quotation wasn’t pulled from some attempt by Ripple to get the government to regulate ETH, was it?
— 𝙳𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚍 𝚂𝚌𝚑𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚝𝚣 (@JoelKatz) August 18, 2022
Ripple CTO David Schwartz accused the Ethereum community of trying to make the government punish projects that disagree with its narrative. The architect behind the XRP Ledger believes that it’s “perfectly fair” to draw a comparison between miners in proof-of-work systems and shareholders in companies. John Deaton, the managing partner of the Deaton Law Firm, also took aim at Buterin, claiming that “innocent” XRP holders have nothing to do with Ripple.
Schwartz concluded his tweet with a question to Buterin, asking him whether the government or the market should settle the security debate.
Ether’s potential status as a security has become a hot topic during the ongoing lawsuit proceedings, with Ripple claiming that the SEC has a clear bias against them and favors Ethereum. In an interview in 2021, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse contended that the SEC helped ETH overtake XRP as the No. 2 cryptocurrency.
Whether cryptocurrencies are securities has been a longstanding debate due to a lack of regulatory guidelines. The majority of regulators around the globe consider Bitcoin an asset, while there is still an ongoing debate over the status of ETH due to its pre-mine and initial coin offering.
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