Early Ripple users all know that in 2017, the Ripple chain was at its peak, and even had the potential to surpass BTC. However, in the seven years since then, ETH has experienced explosive growth with various powerful ecological projects such as DeFi derived from smart contracts, leaving Ripple far behind.
From the perspective of the practical application of blockchain technology, it is much stronger than BTC and ETH. Even traditional financial industry banking institutions, enterprise blockchain SaaS systems, and alliance chain systems for government services have the shadow of Ripple Chain.
And the Ripple wallet may be one of the few public chains that is particularly smooth to operate among the blockchain technology projects I have experienced. The handling fee is low, the transaction speed is very fast, and the gateway transaction order system built into the chain is equivalent to a natural DEX decentralized exchange.
Why is Ripple Chain so mediocre when it is so good? Instead, it is overshadowed by Ethereum, developed by Vitalik Buterin, who once applied for a job at Ripple. Even the TRON ecosystem, which is rumored to have plagiarized the Ripple Chain code, is booming, while the Ripple ecosystem has always been sluggish, and even Ripple's core business of international payment and remittance is shrinking.
There are many early Ripple enthusiasts and technical developers in the community, so why has the Ripple ecosystem not flourished? I personally think that a big reason is that the threshold for Ripple users is too high.
For example, if a new user wants to join Ripple's DeFi ecological project XRPS, he first needs to activate a Ripple wallet and freeze 10 XRPs. Adding a credit XRPS on the Ripple chain requires freezing 2 XRPs. If you want to use the on-chain trading system, you need to freeze 2 XRPs for each transaction order.
This means that if a user wants to use the Ripple chain normally, they need to keep at least 20 XRP in their wallet for on-chain operations. Although the frozen XRP is still stored in the user's wallet and can be unfrozen at any time, the cost of XRP since 2017 has undoubtedly raised the entry threshold for new users and increased the difficulty of promoting the development of the on-chain ecosystem.
Without the entry of new users, the ecosystem gradually withers, leaving only some old users who don’t know where to go. Perhaps the rise of XRPS can reverse the decline of Ripple Chain, but the cost of using Ripple Chain wallet is still a hurdle.
Although this problem is very easy to solve, if the community node voting pass rate exceeds 80%, the freezing parameters can be corrected and the wallet freezing amount can be adjusted down. However, the entire Ripple community was divided into two factions when facing this problem.
On one side are the conservatives who stick to XRP as the core, and on the other side are the radicals in Japan who insist on developing the ecosystem as the primary goal, led by XRPS. The conservative community nodes believe that locking more XRP can reduce the circulation of XRP and increase the value of the Ripple chain.
The radical community nodes believe that lowering the threshold and enriching the ecosystem can attract more Ripple chain users and developers to make Ripple chain prosperous again. The two factions have been unable to reach a consensus on their differences, and several node votes have ended in failure. Perhaps this is one of the drawbacks of blockchain decentralization.
It is worth mentioning that more and more old users of Ripple Chain have given up XRP and turned to XRPS. The market determines the choice. The times are advancing, blockchain technology must continue to innovate, and public chains also need more ecosystems to fill. XRP's sluggish performance has finally awakened some people. Whether Ripple Chain can finally usher in a turnaround and a new life, we will see later. The author specializes in Ripple Chain, so if you are interested, please follow me.
