Ripple CTO David Schwartz has responded to concerns alleging XRP price manipulation via Ripple XRP sales by an X user. Schwartz highlighted Ripple’s transparency, as evidenced by its escrow accounts.
In the past week, there have been conversations on social media over the XRP price, with some members of the XRP community blaming Ripple for the token’s poor performance. Some of them stated that Ripple was dumping XRP onto the market.
In response to these allegations, Schwartz clarified that Ripple had discontinued its programmatic XRP sales, citing Ripple’s Q1, 2023, XRP Markets Report. According to the article, Ripple has only continued to sell XRP in connection with ODL transactions.
I can’t prove that there’s any particular explanation. But I think it’s because the primary drivers of the price of XRP come from factors external to the XRP ecosystem and common to XRP and XLM.
I’ll give two alternative explanations that I don’t believe are correct, but that…
— David “JoelKatz” Schwartz (@JoelKatz) February 19, 2024
In response to Ripple’s CTO comment, an X user asked if it was an “acknowledgement that prices were manipulated in the past.”
Schwartz debunked this claim, stating that Ripple had always tried to minimize the price impact of its sales and that he did not believe that programmatic sales had any effect on the market. He further asked what the motive for price manipulation of XRP by Ripple would be.
Even after Schwartz made these clarifications, some X users still raised doubts regarding Ripple’s XRP sales, hence the Ripple CTO’s reaction.
In response to a question about whether Ripple was considering potential adjustments to sales strategies and XRP deployment, Schwartz replied: “We were originally hoping to get our holdings way down in just a few years, mostly using giveaways. That strategy just didn’t work. We don’t want to be holding lots of XRP for decades, but it’s not clear what other options we have.”
Schwartz argues that the primary drivers of XRP’s price have little to do with any factors specific to the XRP ecosystem. At the time of writing, XRP was up just 0.54% in the last 24 hours to $0.56.
