Ripple/XRP: David Schwartz on regulatory uncertainty hanging over XRP, Ripple

There have been a lot of wars fought on Twitter on the nature of XRP and Ripple’s relationship with the cryptocurrency, with tonnes of articles speculating what XRP is. David Schwartz, the CTO of Ripple, put the speculation to rest in his recent interview at the SXSW Conference.

The CTO clarified that Jed McCaleb, Chris Larsen, and a couple of other people got together and created the XRP ledger. Subsequently, the developers gifted some of the 100 billion XRP created to themselves, and the company Ripple, which are both independent of each other.

He also added that holding XRP did not mean that the person held a stake in the company, Ripple. Schwartz continued by saying that security laws aren’t fully clear as to what rules have to be applied to the nascent technology. He also added,

“Security law has not changed with respect to blockchain technology… the SEC recently has talked about how they are going to think about how these tokens meet security laws. But they haven’t given a black and white test. They’ve given a test but it’s filled with vague terms.”

Additionally, Schwartz said that they were confident and “pretty comfortable” that XRP was not a security, and that it would ultimately be the SEC and the courts that’ll decide whether XRP was a security or not.

He further commented that the biggest hindrance to development in the crypto ecosystem were regulation/laws. Schwartz explained that Ripple and other companies in the space were lobbying regulators about the same.

John Bev, a YouTube user, commented,

“XRP should be used by Men/Women in the Military, who are stationed overseas, to send money back quickly to support their loved ones. We should pay homage for creating ARAPNET, now INTERNET, and allow them to use XRP!”