Ripple CTO lashes back at Vitalik Buterin for his dig on XRP

The criticism of XRP made by Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, didn't sit well with David Schwartz, chief technology officer of Ripple. A conversation about the recent $30,000 cap placed by the Ontario cryptocurrency exchange on purchases of cryptocurrencies with the exception of Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin Cash was begun (BCH).

In a cited reply to a tweet, Buterin praised the Ethereum community's resistance to laws that favour ETH over other lawful cryptocurrencies. In response to Buterin, David Hoffman, the creator of the decentralised media and education network Bankless.eth, stated that he wouldn't have objected if they had restricted XRP.

When they attempted to "throw us under the bus as China-controlled," according to Buterin, they lost their right to protection, and he joined in the XRP criticism. The response from Buterin created a storm among XRP followers on Twitter, and the debate was later joined by Ripple CTO David Schwartz himself.

Buterin was referring to Ripple’s defense in their ongoing court battle against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where they claimed XRP shouldn’t be deemed as security since Ethereum and Bitcoin are similar in nature and even called the top two cryptocurrencies as Chinese controlled. Ripple is fighting a security lawsuit from the SEC over the unlicensed sale and issuance of XRP tokens.

Schwartz reiterated Ripple’s earlier claims of ETH and BTC being security and compared miners in the ecosystem akin to shareholders of eBay. He said: “I do think it’s perfectly fair to analogize miners in PoW systems to stockholders in companies. Just as eBay’s stockholders earn from the residual friction between buyers and sellers that eBay does not remove, so do miners in ETH and BTC.”

Schwartz concluded his tweet with a question to Buterin, asking him whether the security debate should be settled by the government or the market.

Ethereum’s security status became a hot topic during the ongoing lawsuit proceedings, where Ripple has claimed that the SEC has a clear bias against them and it favored Ethereum. In an interview in 2021, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse claimed that SEC helped Ethereum to overtake XRP as the No.2 crypto.

The security status of cryptocurrencies has been a long-driven debate due to a lack of regulatory guidelines. The majority of regulators around the globe consider Bitcoin as an asset, while there is still an ongoing debate over the status of Ethereum due to the pre-mine and initial coin offerings (ICO).