The hardcore crypto purists dislike Ripple because they do business with the big banks and because Ripple is not too different from what we already have today. Ripple xCurrent system is a product used for bank to bank transfers, its an IOU where Ripple is the middleman and it is centralized.
The main aspect of crypto movement is taking out the middle man, the 3rd parties. XRP is trying to replace the middle man. It’s heavily centralized, and the token, in many solutions and systems created and run by Ripple Labs, has no purpose.
These are all arguments of XRP opponents and they have some merit.
However, the truth is, banks have been here for a long time and aren’t going away anytime soon.
Investors who hate Ripple are breaking a major rule of investing: removing emotion. There are some major anarchists who are deep into crypto, and they hate banks, thus they hate Ripple. From an ideology perspective, that can be plausible. But from pure investors’ perspective that is a rookie mistake, letting emotions cloud your reason.
If you are sound investor looking to earn money, you will realize there is value in Ripple’s migration-technology. Regulations will eventually hit hard, and those projects playing by the rules will survive. Ripple may be playing with the banks, but in so working within a pre-existing framework.
What you'll learn 👉
XRP has no purpose or value
Their settlement tech that includes XRP token will be used for settlements. XRPs are required in order to enforce transaction fees. Payment spam needs to be prevented somehow, either with transaction fees or proof-of-something. There’s no “central currency” to use. XRP is decentralized and aims to become more so (if Ripple disappears XRP remains).
The plan for Ripple to maximize xRapid adoption and the appreciation of XRP’s price will primarily be through their premier blockchain tech solutions: xCurrent or xVia. With xCurrent/xVia, banks and other financial institutions are only achieving ~30% in transactional cost savings (https://ripple.com/files/xrp_cost_model_paper.pdf See: Pgs: 7-10).
Along with xRapid, they can achieve upwards to ~42-70% in total cost savings (https://ripple.com/insights/first-pilot-results-for-xrapid/). Since we know banks like to save money, they will probably chose the xRapid solution that includes the use of XRP tokens.
Ripple Labs controls everything and owns 60% of tokens …
Another red-flag issue is XRP tokens are premined and 60% of them are in the hands of Ripple company. But, as XRP enthusiasts will quickly point out, most XRP held by Ripple is I escrow and can’t be cashed out.
However, you could say Ethereum is just as controlled by the Ethereum Foundation as XRP is by Ripple, that’s a single entity that has massive power over ETH. Also, a huge majority of the BTC hash rate rests in the hands of couple of mining entities and less than 0.1% of wallet own 65% of all bitcoins. We are from decentralization on other blockchains as well, Ripple is not the only one with that problem.
You decide whether it’s for you or not.
To conclude …
Will XRP token get adopted and be used widely by banks and other institutions? No one knows.
After all, most of crypto investors are gambling that their token/coin is the winner.
However, we do know that there is a clear mission to a real world problem – making payment faster, cheaper and traceable. There is a good, well educated and smart team behind it which, with XPring and Coil, are pushing the Use Case of the XRP Token even further.
Now, of course that doesn’t fit the mindset of the “we need decentralization” crypto-anarchist. You essentially need to trust a company, but in their own favor they want to keep the network up. That is the reason why Ripple is often despised; you still have to trust someone, who’s essentially profiting from you, too, though. If you’re paranoid, you hate that, but if you’re realistic you realize it’s the way to go.
You can argue you have a moral stance against centralization and that’s fine. But to say it’s a bad investment is just wrong. Whether you like the project or not, there is value to the Ripple system.
