Ripple Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz tweeted the community could force the burning of billions of the protocol’s XRP native tokens held in escrow to prevent the drop in price that would likely occur should those billions in frozen tokens ever flood the market.
- On Dec.2, a Twitter user asked the CTO, “If Nodes, validators and the community at large got together and we agree that it's better for the community to burn the 50 billion XRP Ripple has in escrows would that be possible?”
- Responding to the tweet, David Schwartz implied that majority rule would win in such a decision. "Yes. There would be nothing Ripple could do to stop that from happening. Public blockchains are very democratic. If the majority wants a rules change, there is nothing the minority can do to stop them," Schwartz commented in response.
- Ripple’s XRP sales have been declining after Ripple stopped selling tokens to exchanges. The escrow account held approximately 48.9 billion tokens at the start of 2020.
- As there are currently 45.3 billion tokens in circulation, a sudden release of a sizable portion of those escrowed tokens could cause the price of XRP to plunge.
- XRP was trading at 60 cents during the time of publication on Friday. The price of the token has risen more than 160% in the past 12 months.
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