XRP Won’t be the Last Cryptocurrency Standing, Says Ripple CTO

David Schwartz doesn’t agree with the popular narrative of only one cryptocurrency surviving “crypto-Armageddon.” The Ripple executive believes that coins will form areas of specialization with each species being part of an overarching virtual currency ecosystem in the future.

One Cryptocurrency Can’t Rule Them All

According to the Ripple Chief Technology Officer (CTO), XRP isn’t the one coin to rule them all. Speaking during a Q&A with The Next Web (TNW), Schwartz expressed his belief that XRP has some limitations, adding that one cryptocurrency cannot perform every function. Further commenting on the matter, Schwartz said:

We expect that this will not be a winner take all outcome but instead a number of digital assets can survive for specific use cases. Today, for example, Ethereum provides a “programmable money” function that the XRP Ledger cannot. Adding this capability to the XRP Ledger would have huge costs that reduce XRP’s suitability for payments. You can’t have everything.

More Collaboration, Less Competition

Furthermore, Schwartz called for more collaboration in the budding industry that has so far seen stakeholders vying for market supremacy. Referring to his belief that one coin can’t do it all, the Ripple CTO expressed the need for projects to work together rather than attempt to tear each other down. According to Schwartz:

[Distributed ledger technology] is genuinely a breakthrough and I too hold some [Bitcoin]. If nothing else, the current market mechanics are telling us that we’re all in this together and I don’t think one crypto [sic] project can become successful by pulling others down.

Schwartz even tried to emphasize his convictions, revealing that he owned some Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Ripple has, over the years, tried to gain adoption within the mainstream financial industry by offering a catalog of custom distributed ledger solutions.

Bitcoin’s PoW is a Technological Dead-end

While speaking about collaboration, Schwartz did take a dig at Bitcoin, the top-ranked cryptocurrency by market capitalization. The Ripple CTO called Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol “a technological dead end.”

Cryptocurrency mining based on PoW continues to be a significant talking point both within and the cryptocurrency industry. Concerns – unfounded or otherwise – over the alleged energy consumption of mining activities have been the core of much of the criticisms around the process.

For Schwartz, Ripple constitutes an advancement upon the defective Bitcoin technology even going as far as to claim that Ripple Labs making was significant improvements to Bitcoin’s technology on its XRP Ledger framework.

What do you think about David Schwartz’s comments? Let us know your views in the comment section below.

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