A debate over the XRP Ledger’s (XRPL) economy model has ignited after Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), David Schwartz, directly addressed questions about taxation on the blockchain. Critics have suggested that if XRP holders do not earn from the ecosystem, someone must be collecting a tax. Schwartz’s response challenges this assumption, framing the XRP Ledger as a public utility rather than a profit-generating mechanism for token holders. The debate has since sparked broader conversations about real-world use cases, passive income expectations, and the underlying purpose of the XRPL blockchain. Ripple CTO Says No Tax On The XRP Ledger In a post on X social media, Schwartz clarified that the XRP Ledger does not impose a tax on its users. He explained that the ledger allows holders to issue assets, trade, create NFTs, and make payments without central authority extracting value from these financial activities. He also stated that transaction fees and reserves exist solely as anti-spam measures, not as a mechanism for wealth extraction. Related Reading: Ripple CTO Explains Real Value Of XRP Ledger And Why It Doesn’t Trigger Price Rallies The Ripple CTO emphasized that ownership of XRP does not give anyone the right to collect fees or profits from the ledger itself. He drew a comparison to Bitcoin’s blockchain, highlighting that the XRPL provides similar decentralized functionality while also supporting features such as Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs), stablecoins, and NFTs. These features work without XRP holders needing to profit from the system’s operations. Schwartz’s remarks on taxes on the XRPL blockchain come after Matthew Sigel, head of digital asset research at VanEck, raised questions about who benefits if XRP holders do not earn anything from the ecosystem and the protocol itself does not generate value. In response, other members of the community, including XRPL dUNL validator Vet, emphasized that the absence of a tax encourages developers and users to focus on building meaningful, functional use cases rather than relying on passive income. XRP’s Utility Outweighs Tax Considerations The XRPL tax debate between Schwartz and Sigel also intersected with discussions about the blockchain’s real-world applications. In a much earlier post, Sigel questioned the blockchain’s relevance, subtly hinting that its supporters overstate its functionality. Related Reading: XRP Leading A $400 Trillion Revolution? How Ripple’s Tokenization Campaign Is Sparking Utility In response, an XRP community member pointed to the recent collaboration between Ondo Finance, Ripple, and BlackRock, in which the XRP Ledger will be utilized for stablecoin issuance, minting, Treasury asset redemption, and liquidity enhancement in financial markets. While Sigel acknowledged the innovative initiative, he reiterated that these applications do not directly generate revenue for XRP token holders, highlighting a gap between network activity and personal gain. Schwartz responded by explaining that the value of XRPL stems from enabling financial independence and reducing reliance on intermediaries, rather than providing passive income. He added that focusing on tax collection as a measure of success can overshadow the blockchain’s purpose of promoting open access and meaningful innovation. Featured image from Peakpx, chart from Tradingview.com
1inch unveiled Aqua, a shared liquidity protocol designed to let multiple DeFi strategies run on the same capital without locking funds, at Devconnect.
Uniswap has unveiled its Continuous Clearing Auction protocol for onchain token auctions with automatic liquidity seeding and optional ZK-based privacy.
The Bermuda Monetary Authority issued its first license to a decentralized derivatives protocol, the DAO-governed DerivaDEX.
OKX is following competitors like Coinbase by integrating DeFi trading directly into their core self-custody wallet product.
Dromos Labs unveiled a central liquidity hub called Aero to serve as a home base for additional EVM extensions beyond Base and Optimism.
An onchain analyst speculated Hyperliquid paused transactions after a trader tried to prop up the price of memecoin POPCAT.
Perp DEX Lighter has raised $68 million as venture capitalists double down on the surging market for decentralized perpetual trading platforms.
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams and key Uniswap Foundation leaders proposed a plan to burn UNI tokens and merge the organizations.
The following article is adapted from The Block’s newsletter, The Daily, which comes out on weekday afternoons.
USDX, which had an all-time circulating supply of $683 million, is trading below $0.60, raising concerns of potential defaults.
Balancer’s preliminary report says a rounding flaw in swap logic caused the recent exploit, with recovery efforts underway across affected chains and forks.
Hyperliquid was the outlier among major perp DEXs as it ended the month about 16% below its peak two months prior.
The following article is adapted from The Block’s newsletter, The Daily, which comes out on weekday afternoons.
Liquid, a crypto perp DEX aggregator, has raised $7.6 million in seed funding from investors including Paradigm and General Catalyst.
Berachain has halted its network to perform an emergency hard fork after a Balancer exploit, with losses topping $128 million across chains.
Decentralized exchange trading volume soared to a record $613.3 billion in October, up from around $500 billion in September.
dYdX will not be able to offer perpetual futures trading in the U.S., but said it will look forward to future regulatory changes.
“The fact that other chains are faster or cheaper is irrelevant, in our view,” Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick said.
Uniswap is adding DOGE, XRP, and ZEC support through the Universal protocol, which mints and burns tokens to create bridgeable “uAssets.”
Bitget Wallet said it plans on adding Hyperliquid's perpetual trading features onto the wallet system in the coming weeks.
JPMorgan see Coinbase’s Base network growth and upcoming token exploration as a shift toward deeper onchain monetization.
Hyperliquid Strategies, a digital asset treasury firm focused on HYPE, submitted an S-1 filing with the SEC to raise $1 billion.
Bunni said required audits and monitoring expenses alone would cost between six and seven figures to restore operations.
Solana co-creator Anatoly Yakovenko is building an onchain perps DEX, according to detailed documentation posted on GitHub.
The updated protocol is "seamlessly integrated" into all Jupiter products, including its mobile and desktop apps as well as its API and Pro Tools.
This aims to address fragmentation in DeFi especially between Solana and Ethereum ecosystems, Uniswap noted.
Wintermute founder and CEO Evgeny Gaevoy sheds light on the recent crypto wipeout and how market makers deal with such events.
The following article is adapted from The Block’s newsletter, The Daily, which comes out on weekday afternoons.
Some users complained about unexpectedly low token allocations quoted by the “S2 airdrop checker” deployed on Friday.