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Following Ripple’s successful political activism via Fairshake and its other Washington DC lobbying efforts, its critics are reinvigorated. After it scored a victory in Donald Trump’s executive order that deprioritized bitcoin (BTC) and emphasized stablecoins like Ripple USD, Bitcoiners have focused their vitriol on the billionaire-led company for allegedly derailing plans for a US National Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Leading the attack is Riot Platforms’ Pierre Rochard, a Bitcoin maximalist. Leading the defense is Ripple CTO David Schwartz, who has fired back against Rochard’s claims that the XRP Ledger (XRPL) blockchain is centralized. Behind them, thousands of the communities’ supporters are rallying support for their causes. For example, Rochard retweeted a thread describing XRPL as being centrally administered by Ripple Labs. The thread highlights a legal notice from Ripple asserting that it and its logo are trademarked. Rochard went on to make the case that XRP is...

This Ethereum layer-2 platform pioneered a novel approach to a critical component of blockchain transactions, effectively mitigating vulnerabilities associated with centralized structures. In their quest for scalability and cost-effectiveness, many layer-2 networks adopt a centralized approach to on-chain transaction processing, introducing a single point of failure vulnerability. The Metis blockchain, however, has pioneered a distributed sequencer pool to improve security and decentralization. The Ethereum blockchain introduced smart contracts to automate certain events on the network , laying the foundation of decentralized finance (DeFi). As the DeFi ecosystem continues its exponential growth, however, the limitations of Ethereum have become clear. Despite last year’s migration to proof-of-stake, partially addressing the scalability issues of the Ethereum blockchain, the Ethereum network remains expensive when it comes to gas fees — the cost of each transaction executed on the blo...