Flare Labs CEO Hugo Philion offers clarity as Ripple’s RLUSD Chainlink partnership sparks uproar.
Before Donald Trump’s election victory sparked anticipation of friendly regulatory conditions, the XRP community already had a looming development stoking excitement: the launch of Ripple’s enterprise-grade stablecoin RLUSD that promised to bring liquidity and a DeFi boost to the XRP Ledger.
Following a recent Ripple partnership to bolster RLUSD’s DeFi suitability for Ethereum, however, a section of the XRP community has been left feeling jilted.
Ripple’s Chainlink Partnership Sparks Flare Uproar
To bolster RLUSD’s use in DeFi, On Tuesday, January 7, Ripple announced that it had partnered with decentralized oracle provider Chainlink to offer reliable and secure price feeds for the stablecoin on Ethereum.
While the news had largely sparked excitement about RLUSD’s prospects, a cross-section of the community has been up in arms. These community members are also members of the Flare community.
.@Ripple x @Chainlink: $RLUSD has adopted the Chainlink standard for verifiable data to fuel DeFi adoption with real-time, secure pricing data.
The future of stablecoins is here: https://t.co/mq3cThLGQJ pic.twitter.com/993Ac0o282
— Ripple (@Ripple) January 7, 2025
Flare is a project with strong ties to the XRP community since it initially started out as a project promising to be the smart contract layer of the XRPL. While the project instead pivoted to a standalone Layer 1 blockchain seeking XRP liquidity through staking incentives for bridged tokens, it has maintained strong support from the XRP community through ongoing token airdrops to long-time XRP holders.
These XRP holders who have benefited from Flare view Ripple’s Chainlink partnership as a job for Flare.
“Ripple should’ve had to partner with Flare. FLR is WAY more superior than Chainlink, and we all know it,” one such user wrote.
This view comes as the bulk of Flare’s marketing has been on its oracle and interoperability capabilities via its so-called Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO) and Data Connector.
So why did Ripple partner with Chainlink instead? Flare Labs CEO Hugo Philion has presented an answer.
Flare Simply Can’t Do What Ripple Needs?
Responding to the uproar, Philion clarified that Flare did not yet provide oracles to other networks. He stressed that for now the focus of the network remained offering staking and DeFi incentives for bridged XRP, Bitcoin, and Dogecoin.
I’m at a loss as to why this would be interesting. Ripple needs an oracle so that RLUSD can be used in lending protocols on Ethereum. Flare doesn’t provide oracles to other networks yet. It’s something that may come but there are much bigger opportunities to pursue first: FAssets…
— Hugo Philion ☀️ (@HugoPhilion) January 7, 2025
It is also unclear that Flare will ever expand its oracles beyond its network as Philion describes it as “something that MAY come.”
While the Flare co-founder’s statement has offered some calm, others have questioned the project’s prospects. Suppose Flare’s value proposition is offering DeFi opportunities to holders of assets like Bitcoin. In that case, it may have its work cut out for it as blockchains like Ethereum offer similar opportunities with more established DeFi ecosystems.
