There is a growing movement of discontented XRP users who have had enough of Ripple, the company behind the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, dumping tokens onto the market.
This has led to petitions against Ripple; the CEO of the company, Brad Garlinghouse speaking out; and even a plan to fork the XRP chain and take control of the cryptocurrency away from Ripple and into a more decentralized channel.
The idea of forking the XRP chain to gain control is a powerful notion and one that should always in play in the decentralized and democratic world of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency influencer, called Crypto Bitlord on Twitter, is looking to head this fork.
In essence, if Crypto Bitlord can garner enough support out of those interested to support his coin – XRP One – more than the original coin, there is every chance he could usurp the power from Ripple. He would also have to convince exchanges to support him too, and there are a number of other niche factors to consider.
Theoretically, a fork is probably not the right term to use here as it would rather be a rival coin created from scratch to compete with Ripple, according to the Twitter personality.
Crypto Bitlord told Cointelegraph: “We aren’t exactly forking, more starting from scratch, removing the dodgy founders premine and s—ty banking integrations.” He then elaborated:
“From what I’ve read on twitter you can’t actually fork it. We can start from scratch and tweak some s—, but a fork is very difficult. From what I’ve read in my feed we basically gotta clone the GitHub and make some simple changes. I’m pretty sure there’s a YouTube tutorial on how to do it.”
Even still, new coin or fork, it would be difficult for this project to pick up immediate success and threaten Ripple, which leaves one wondering just how powerful, or serious, of a threat it is.
The hardest part about a fork is to ensure its stability by having a growing community around it,” Eyal Shani, a blockchain researcher at consulting firm Aykesubir, said. Part of this is not only having the disgruntled #XRPArmy – vocal XRP holders and supporters – on board but also growing the coin and ensuring its liquidity and distribution on a number of exchanges.
“Fact of the matter is these folks don’t have enough purchasing power to support the market price of the current XRP token, there’s no reason to believe they’d fare any better by simply forking the XRP ledger,” Juan M. Villaverde, the chief crypto analyst at Weiss Ratings, added.
