Cardano founder firm against partnering with XRP due to harassment

One year after Charles Hoskinson shocked the cryptocurrency community by openly stating that XRP had “no partnership or technical value,” the founder of Cardano (ADA) remains adamant about his position, citing two years of harassment by the members of the XRP community.

As it happens, X user Good Morning Crypto quoted Hoskinson’s post from December 17, 2022, tagging the Cardano founder and asking him if he still stood “by those bold proclamations about XRP’s value,” to which Hoskinson responded affirmatively and explained his stance in a comment on December 17, 2023.

XRP crowd’s harassment

According to the Cardano founder, the reason behind his dismissive attitude was “two years of daily harassment by the community, the lack of technical overlap between Cardano and XRP, and the different product market fit.” As Hoskinson added:

“Projects like Tezos (XTZ), Algorand (ALGO), Polkadot (DOT), Ethereum (ETH), and Cardano are solving similar problems. Ripple is built for a different purpose. The connection of the tech makes no sense. Especially given the constant personal attacks, harassment, and utter inability to have a conversation.”

Furthermore, he explained that “many members of the XRP community will not accept or understand my statements,” noting that even the original question “provokes a fight,” which he expects would result in “another string of articles, Reddit posts, anti-Charles tweets,” and wondering what the point of asking it was.

Asked by 24HRSCRYPTO to “define ‘daily harassment,’” who argued that “you called us all conspiracy theorists, and we ended up being right,” Hoskinson said that stating Ethereum and ConsenSys co-founder Joe Lubin bribed the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to go after Ripple was indeed a conspiracy theory.

It is a conspiracy theory to state Joe Lubin bribed the SEC to go after Ripple. No evidence has ever been presented. Again you are unable to understand my comments. You are again conflating the free pass with my comments. Thanks for proving my point.

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) December 17, 2023

On top of that, Hoskinson pointed out that, on October 16, he “even made a 52-minute video on this topic breaking down my opinion exhaustively” on his YouTube channel, a video which he claimed the XRP community “ignored and misrepresented.”

On Ripple and XRP

In further discussion, the Cardano founder claimed that there was “no hit on XRP from me,” as he had received a request to share his opinion on the SEC action against XRP, and the XRP community did not like his opinion, “and then spent the next two years harassing me daily over a straw man of it.”

Finally, Hoskinson defended his views on Ripple as “an interbank settlement system and [central bank digital currency (CBDC)] stack” and “not a decentralized smart contract system,” which he added that the Ripple team “never implemented” and instead “abandoned the project.”

As a reminder, the Cardano founder has been at odds with, as he called them, “XRP trolls” for quite some time, receiving criticism over his views, such as the above conspiracy theories, and promising in December 2022 to stop discussing the XRP ecosystem altogether over the “vicious” community attacks.

More recently, he attracted more criticism over challenging the prevailing narrative by asserting that the crypto industry no longer needed Bitcoin (BTC) to survive and that Bitcoin instead needed the industry and crypto exchanges to survive, as Finbold reported on December 10.