Bitcoin ‘tribalism’ is holding the crypto industry back, Ripple CEO says
According to Ripple, the head of the blockchain company Ripple, ‘Tribalism’ around bitcoin and other cryptocurrency is holding back the $2 trillion global market.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse stated that “Polarization isn’t healthy in my judgment,” during a CNBC-hosted fireside conversation at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit last Wednesday.
“I own Bitcoin, Ethereum, and I have some other assets. This industry will continue to prosper is my belief.
Garlinghouse said that all boats can rise.
Garlinghouse is a former Yahoo executive who compared today’s crypto industry to the dotcom era in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
‘Yahoo and eBay could both be successful,’ he said. He said that they solve different problems. “There are different uses, different audiences and different markets. Many of these parallels are still apparent today, I believe.
According to CoinGecko data, there are currently tens of thousand of cryptocurrencies in circulation. They total $2 trillion.
Some digital coins have attracted a large following, not least bitcoin. Bitcoin’s hardcore supporters are often called’maximalists’.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and microStrategy CEO Michael Saylor were among those so-called maximalists that support only bitcoin.
Garlinghouse stated that such maximalism has led to a crypto industry with ‘fractured representation’ when lobbying U.S. lawmakers.
President Joe Biden signed last month an executive order requesting that the government examine the benefits and risks of cryptocurrency.
He said, “The lack of coordination between the crypto industry and Washington, D.C., is shocking.”
Ripple is frequently linked to XRP, which the company uses for cross border payments.
The majority of the 100 billion XRP tokens are owned by the company. It releases them from an escrow account periodically to maintain stable prices.
Ripple is in Court with Securities and Exchange Commission. The company was accused of illegally selling more than $1 billion in XRP through an unregistered securities offer. The company argues that XRP should not be considered a security but a virtual currency.