The blockchain payment giant Ripple’s chief technology officer David Schwartz has admitted the company could be forced by validators to burn its 48 billion XRP tokens, regardless of if it agrees with the decision or not. Ripple holds half the total XRP supply and has come under fire from the community for selling off tokens in the past, although it resolutely refuted claims of price manipulation and has stopped the practice in recent times.
“Community could vote for Ripple to burn their entire supply of XRP tokens.”
In a series of tweets, Ripple CTO Schwartz confirmed that the community could vote for Ripple to burn their entire supply of XRP tokens, stating that the blockchain is “very democratic.” He noted, “there would be nothing Ripple could do to stop that from happening.” XRP Ledger amendments require an 80% approval rating from the ledger’s validators and are activated if they stay above that threshold for two weeks. In June, validators on the XRPL notably voted to adopt a new amendment, dubbed “the Checks Amendment,” without Ripple’s support.
Ripple CTO hit out at Stellar Development Fund for burning more than 50% of the total XLM tokens.
The amendment also introduces users’ ability to write checks to each other for a predetermined amount of XRP that can be redeemed at a later period. David Schwartz’s comments come as something of a postscript to an incident in November last year where it was revealed Ripple could also unilaterally decide to burn the billions in excess supply. At the time, Stellar had just reduced its total supply of 105 billion XLM tokens down to 50 billion. Ripple CTO hit out at the Stellar Development Fund for burning more than 50% of the total XLM tokens writing. He wrote, “too bad XRP is decentralized, or someone could just burn half the supply and raise the price to 29 cents.”
