Several regulators around the world have issued guidelines focusing on ICOs with some prohibiting their operations; however, Ripple’s CEO believes governments are right to regulate them.
Speaking to CNBC, Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of blockchain firm Ripple and the XRP token, said that while there are plenty of ICOs, he doesn’t believe that new digital currencies are ‘solving real problems.’
He added:
So I think it’s good that you have regulators intervening and stepping in, in countries around the world.
According to CoinMarketCap, Ripple’s XRP token currently ranks third, behind bitcoin and ethereum. At the time of publishing, one token is valued at $0.249764 with a market cap worth $9.6 billion. Earlier this month Ripple’s price surged by 30 percent bolstered by growth of RippleNet, the startups enterprise network, as it added its 100th member.
Ripple has faced criticism in the past with the most common accusation of being a centralized network. However, in May it was reported that Ripple had unveiled a three-point strategy to make its blockchain, the Ripple Consensus Ledger (RCL), ‘more secure, efficient and decentralized than bitcoin.’
The three steps include:
- Diversifying the validator nodes on the blockchain;
- Recruiting attested validators to the network, and;
- Adding attested validators to its Unique Nodes Lists (UNLs).
At the time, Stefan Thomas, Ripple’s technology chief, said:
A key benchmark that we aim to achieve is to become more decentralized than bitcoin, which at the time of writing is 51% controlled by just five mining pools.
Created in 2012, Ripple’s RCL was created as an enterprise-ready public blockchain aimed for banks and payment providers to process cross-border payments.
Ripple continues to expand its services in the banking sector and has recently branched into Asia. In September, Ripple opened a new office in India, the world’s largest remittance receiver, and in Singapore, one of Asia’s leading financial hubs. In April, Ripple laid claim to matching the transaction output of Visa, the world’s largest payments network, with 70k transactions at an average time of 3.7 seconds.