XRP’s next fork is unlikely to succeed as Ripple faces angry investors

XRP’s next hard fork is looming over Ripple, the San-Francisco-based startup behing the world’s third-largest altcoin.

XRP and Ripple facing disgruntled investors

@Crypto_Bitlord, a Twitter user who boasts over 100,000 followers, who claims to hold XRP, has been rallying XRP investors who have shown disappointment in the token’s recent performance, to split from the original ledger in light of Ripple’s alleged dumping of XRP tokens. The plan comes hot on the heels after a popular change.org petition by the same user dubbed “Stop Ripple Dumping,” which has garnered more than 3,500 signatures in the past month.

However, it seems that @Crypto_Bitlords plan seems to be mostly a trolling attempt which is yet to become concrete. Despite this, there are many disgruntled XRP investors out there, many of whom are taking Ripple to court.

XRP dumping is not the main factor behind the poor performance

Ripple’s current PR fiasco began escalating in early August when Crypto Bitlord created the change.org petition.

He wrote, citing the potential catalyst for XRP’s poor performance:

“The only logical explanation is that Ripple are dumping on us. And not small amounts either. Literally billions.”

As per data from several crypto monitoring resources, XRP has shed more than 20% of its value this year. This is while at least eight of the top ten cryptocurrencies have seen moderate or stellar price gains (in the case of Bitcoin).

Furthermore, Ripple’s quarterly reports confirm that the startup has indeed been selling notable amounts of XRP to fund its operations.

Most recently, Ripple has joined forces with PNC, the U.S’s eighth-largest bank to utilise its cross-border payments service, xCurrent.

XRP fork is not likely to succeed

On August 26, Crypto Bitlord took his anti-Ripple efforts one step further. The crypto enthusiast revealed that he is considering an XRP fork:

“I’m thinking about forking $XRP so we don’t have to deal with the founders dumping. — This will be a community effort. Retweet if you’re in.”

Then, on September 6, he kind of confirmed his plan, posting a tweet to comment on his original plan:
“it looks like we’re doing this.”

When questioned on his strategy for Ripple One (the proposed project name) he stated:

“We aren’t exactly forking, more starting from scratch, removing the dodgy founders premine and s—ty banking integrations.”

He went on to elaborate:

“From what I’ve read on twitter you can’t actually fork it. We can start from scratch and tweak some s—, but a fork is very difficult. From what I’ve read in my feed we basically gotta clone the github and make some simple changes. I’m pretty sure there’s a YouTube tutorial on how to do it.”

A blockchain researcher at the consulting firm Aykesubir, Eyal Shani told the press that XRP could be forked:

“You can just take their source code and start your own chain, the only problem is whether you can convince the Ripple validators to convert to your chain.”

On the other side, Ripple has their work cut out for them as the company is currently battling it out in court in several lawsuits. The original complaint was filed back in May 2018, by the law firm Taylor-Copeland on behalf its client, Ryan Coffey an XRP investor, who launched a class action suit against Ripple Labs, its subsidiary XRP II and Garlinghouse. As per Coffey’s complaint, Ripple’s sale of XRP is in direct violation of U.S. securities laws as the token features “all the traditional hallmarks of a security.”

Coffey’s class-action suit has been further coupled with three similar complaints against Ripple and the case has been moved from the SEC to the federal court. On August 5th, an amended complaint was filed, citing new allegations against the startup. Ripple has until September 19 to address the accusations officially.

At the time of writing, XRP is up by a tepid 0.06% and trading at $0.263030 per token as per data from CoinMarketCap. Be sure to check in at 14:00 for your top ten cryptocurrency news and prices.