XRP Community Lashes Back At Popular Author for Calling Ripple ‘Completely Retarded’

The XRP Army didn’t take recent comments from Eric Yakes, the author of The 7th Property: Bitcoin and the Monetary Revolution, very kindly.

In a lengthy post on X, Yakes unleashed an attack on the fundamental nature of Ripple and its XRP token, suggesting that Ripple is exactly the problem Bitcoin was created to solve.

Yakes Explains Why Ripple Is “Completely Retarded”

Eric Yakes claimed that Ripple lacks a legitimate use case, labeling it “completely retarded”. Yakes said he was forced to “waste an hour” researching Ripple ahead of his speech at a TradFi conference. In his opinion, this research convinced him that Ripple’s technology and XRP tokenomics resemble the very kind of centralized monetary issuance that Bitcoin was created to abolish.

The author explained his logic in detail and slammed the remittance and central bank digital currency (CBDC) goals often touted by Ripple as sketchy, stating that “nobody wants to use a volatile, centralized and illiquid bridge currency (XRP)” when more suitable options for remittances — such as stablecoins or Bitcoin — are already in existence.

Yakes also quipped, “The only use case is to trick retail investors into pumping the token price,” which he thinks is orchestrated via marketing partnerships with banks, coupled with political lobbying. He further suggested that the XRP token supply lacks true scarcity, arguing that the ledger could be easily forked and that Ripple would sell XRP to fund “bs adoption narratives.”

The pundit further claimed that RippleNet’s reported volume numbers were significantly small compared to other crypto assets. He cited RippleNet’s self-reported total settlement volume of $30 billion since launch, contrasting it to the daily turnover of $50 billion for Tether and Bitcoin’s $40 billion. As such, he believes Ripple’s claim of large-scale adoption is “a deceptive game of smoke and mirrors.”

“For the reasons above, there is zero incentive to use a token with a foundation that dumps on retail to finance political lobbying as a global settlement network bridge currency.”

Yakes also suggested that XRP is not as decentralized as Ripple claims, citing the hour-long network halt last week. In his belief, a primary node operator intervened without wider coordination, and the other 35 validators cannot secure the XRP Ledger because they are not paid to run nodes.

“If you want this corrupt group to achieve political favor to make their shitcoin worth something, you need to go find a higher purpose in life,” Yakes summarized, leaving no doubt about his disdain for both Ripple and XRP

XRP Community Fires Back

Members of the XRP community swiftly criticized Yakes and laid out counterarguments against his commentary.

Former Ripple developer Matt Hamilton, for instance, pointed to Yakes’s conflation of Ripple, the blockchain startup, and XRP, the token. “Ripple and XRP are different things. One is a company (like Strike) and one is a cryptocurrency (like Bitcoin). The stated goals of remittances and CBDCs apply specifically to Ripple, not XRP,” Hamilton posited.

He also clarified some public narratives about Ripple’s partnerships, arguing that while incentivizing early adoption is popular for young companies looking for liquidity, it does not invalidate the protocol’s underlying utility.

Another XRP enthusiast going by the alias Vet on X told Yakes that he “wouldn’t stand” a single debate on the XRP Ledger versus Bitcoin. “This is the single largest collection of misinformation or bad understanding of both Bitcoin and the XRPL I have seen,” he added.