Ripple’s chief technology officer (CTO) David Schwartz has confirmed that the company could be forced to burn billions in XRP if the community willed it.
Ripple, a currency exchange network that offers the XRP token — currently trading at $0.62 — cannot be mined. There are 100 billion coins available, roughly half of which are held by Ripple.
At its all-time high, XRP was valued at $3.40. It is expected that a breakout could take place soon, pushing the price beyond the $1 mark.
On December 2, a Twitter user going by the handle “IKHOR” asked the CTO what Ripple’s reaction would be if all nodes, validators, and the community “at large” agreed that the XRP held in escrow by Ripple should be burned.
In response, Schwartz implied that majority rule would win such a decision.
“Yes. There would be nothing Ripple could do to stop that from happening,” Schwartz commented. “Public blockchains are very democratic. If the majority wants a rules change, there is nothing the minority can do to stop them.”
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The Ripple executive previously explained that XRP could be burned by “paying it as a fee or by sending it to an account whose public key hash has insufficient entropy to have a corresponding private key anyone could ever find.”
As noted by Coin Telegraph, Ripple has come under fire in the past for selling millions of tokens on a regular basis.
When asked how much XRP the CTO personally held, Schwartz said he holds “more than one million and less than 10 million.”
While congratulating the Ethereum community on the launch of the Beacon chain, Schwartz also reflected on the future of Bitcoin (BTC), saying: “Bitcoin has to continue to evolve to avoid technological obsolescence.”
Over the past month, Bitcoin has experienced a resurgence close to the 2017 high of close to $20,000. At the time of writing, BTC is trading at $19,381.
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