Ripple (XRP) has been at the center stage of the cryptocurrency industry with many great developments in its favor. However, Forbes’s Jason Bloomberg published an article saying Ripple is a scam.
That was just a month before Bitcoin got to it’s sky high of more than $20,000. Even though that result never happened again, last few years Bitcoin proved to be everything but a fraud. Not just that, but since then, plenty of other cryptocurrencies emerged and found their place under the crypto sky. One of them is XRP.
And we have to admit, it was pretty surprising when last month JP Morgan came out with the suggestions of JPM Coin, a US dollar-backed cryptocurrency that would be used for cross-border transactions with the bank’s client. However, they lamented its use as an internal-payment tool within JP Morgan. A recent statement by the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon suggested that JPM Coin could one day be used outside the bank.
Few days ago, Forbes found themselves the subject of ridicule (or even bribery) at the hands of the XRP army, when one of their writers casually indicated that Ripple may be a scam. The writer named Jason Bloomberg was also an author of the article about above mentioned JPM Coin.
Within the article, certain parallels were drawn between JPM’s latest venture and Ripple themselves. However, rather than positing JPM Coin as competition to Ripple, Jason Bloomberg simply dismissed Ripple as an outright scam – seemingly through conjuncture and without any real explanation given.
Of course, the XRP/Ripple community didn’t stand for it, calling Jason out for his evident lack of research.
He started an article saying that Ripple was originally designed as a “pump and dump” project because the company works really hard to pump the price, but does so cleverly so that only those who look closely enough can spot the issues. He writes:
“At its core, the Ripple business model is a pump and dump scheme, as it undergoes numerous activities to increase the value of the XRP cryptocurrency (crypto). Unlike most crypto pump and dumps, however, Ripple takes numerous steps to obscure this basic fact.”
Jason Bloomberg didn’t stop himself here. He actually claims that Ripple pays its “customers” to promote XRP in an arrangement called the RippleNet Accelerator program. One would have thought the clients would pay Ripple for its services. That puts a huge question mark on Ripple and how they run the business.
He also touches issues such as XRP being the security, liquidity issue, customers, technology and more. We actually recommend that you read this entire article.
The Ripple Community Strikes Back
As expected the XRP and Ripple community defended their favorite crypto company and the digital asset XRP. Everyone knows that the community is strong and really active.
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The truth is, and we already wrote about it, Ripple has issues with central control. Ripple claims not to own or have created XRP, however it controls over 60% of the total XRP circulating supply. Ripple argues that XRP is an open source project that is separate from the Ripple company. It, however, claims the group of developers gave it a large percentage of XRP.
The question is for what? Jason Bloomberg believes it is for pumping the price of the token.
However, Ryan Zagone, Ripple Director of Regulatory Relations had said:
“XRP is open source and it was not created by our company, so that existed as an open source technology. We created a company that was interested in modernizing payments and then began using that open-source tech to do so … We didn’t create XRP… What we do have is we do own a significant amount of XRP, it was gifted to us by some of the open-source developers that created it. But there’s not a direct connection between Ripple the company and XRP.”
That Forbes is in favor of JPM Coin is a well-known fact. Perhaps one of the most famous was an article published by Ms. Frances Coppola in Forbes that explained how JP Morgan Coin was a “slap in the face” for Ripple.
He wrote:
“JPMCoin is a slap in the face for Ripple. Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO, is on record as saying he expects major banks to adopt xRapid, along with the XRP token, in 2019. Now, J.P. Morgan – unquestionably a major bank – has told Ripple that there is no way they are using xRapid or XRP.”
However, a report issued by Binance Research, after careful analysis, concludes that in principle, the differences between JP Morgan’s cryptocurrency and XRP are so vast that both tokens could not compete directly.
First, Binance highlights the fact that JP Morgan is a stablecoin, whereas XRP is a volatile cryptocurrency. This in itself is an essential difference since one can be used as a means of speculation while the other cannot. JP Morgan’s currency would, in any case, compete with other stablecoins such as USDT, TUSD, USDC, GUSD, etc, and even that doesn’t seem to be the case either.
Another fundamental difference is that JP Morgan does not seem to be interested in opening its cryptocurrency to trading (however, they are open to that possibility). Also, the token’s blockchain will be private and controlled by JP Morgan. They said:
“For this pilot project, J.P. Morgan is specifically targeting institutional clients such as banks, brokers, dealers and other large corporations primarily for settlement and value transfer use cases within a closed ecosystem. J.P. Morgan has made it clear that the intent of this pilot is to test stablecoins and blockchain technologies to improve internal processes, ultimately resulting in efficiency gains and cost reductions for its global client base.”
Just a LowQquality Paid Article from JP Morgan?
Last but not least, let’s not forget the fact that the exact Jason Bloomberg is the head of intellyx.com, a company involved in providing paid content. They said their customers are both end consumers and business users who expect more options, higher quality and better service, at competitive prices with on-demand availability.
We, at Coinspeaker, just cannot escape the impression that this article is paid for and as such, can not serve as the serious analysis. The question is only: is that’s because JP Morgan so scared by XRP and just wants to outperform it this way?
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