Ripple Exec Targets Libra For Centralisation

A senior executive at the blockchain cross-border remittance firm based in San-Francisco, Ripple looks like he’s starting a modern-day “cola war” with their upcoming rival stablecoin Libra, the controversial cryptocurrency from Facebook.

The head of Ripple’s International strategic accounts, Marcus Treacher has had his say on the upcoming stablecoin and said it is “a walled garden.” The senior exec at Ripple expressed concern that only a handful of big players including Facebook, Visa, MasterCard, Uber, and PayPal, practice excessive control over Libra. This gives it a right to limit specific services or even ban certain outside layers from getting involved in Libra’s ecosystem.

But as Treacher points out, Ripple is not a closed system and says the firm doesn’t have any parameters.

He stated:

“It connects with all of the players that want to use the technology.”

When it comes to business scaling, Facebook has no competition, not really anyway, and especially not in Ripple. When Libra launches, around 1.5 billion people will be able to access it which would make it the strongest and most powerful tool out there as one of the world’s significant payment services, a fact that has troubled competitors while receiving brutal criticism from regulators and lawmaker.

Many big worldwide figures like Donald Trump have expressed their worry against Libra and crypto, including France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire who cautioned that he would push to have Libra banned all across Europe.

The CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, meanwhile, said Libra is acting as a replacement for the US dollar, saying:

“I think there is a little bit, maybe, more than just ambitious, maybe arrogant to take the approach of ‘hey, we are going to build a white paper articulates, a new currency.”

The rise in the price of cryptocurrencies has been often accompanied by an increase of general interest by big institutional investors. At the end of 2017, we saw a lot more people enter the market who probably never even heard of cryptocurrency and get involved with the space. 

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