The rivalry between Ripple, the XRP Ledger and Stellar Lumens has a long history. The most recent development in the relationship between the two companies comes from Cory Johnson, Chief Market Strategist at Ripple, who spoke his mind about Stellar.
The founding of Stellar in 2014 by Ripple’s co-founder Jed McCaleb marked a milestone in the crypto world. The Stellar Lumens project was designed to enable fast, cost-effective and reliable cross-border payments. The project aims to create a unified payment system for both financial institutions and people around the world. Ripple was developed with a very similar goal, only with the slight difference that Ripple focuses on the mainstream financial world. Obviously, a great deal of competition was inevitable.
Recently, there have been rumours that McCaleb is selling his XRP tokens, acquired at the time, to drive down the price of XRP. This led to the question of whether McCaleb was acting within the terms set by Ripple as a series of lawsuits against him set out. As Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, has made clear:
Jed had a long list of bad ideas that Ripple’s board didn’t want to put into practice. So Jed Stellar began based on those ideas…[he] tried to get rid of his XRP quickly, and Ripple acted to stop him through a series of lawsuits.
When he decided to leave Ripple, a settlement was reached between McCaleb and Ripple in which he had to sell all the shares in the company he owned. In return, McCaleb must slowly sell his XRP instead of selling it all at once.
McCaleb recently went on to insult Ripple, finding an example in an interview with CNBC where he said:
It’s very difficult to operate nodes outside Ripple Labs. The team runs the majority of the nodes that should be of concern to people.
Cory Johnson then talked about XLM and McCaleb and explained that Stellar doesn’t have a broad developer base:
“I don’t really have an opinion on that. I mean, you know, obviously he’s a super smart guy, but to build a really big company that uses digital assets, that’s a real challenge. There are many companies developing on XRP. I don’t know many who develop Lumens other than Stellar.”
