XRP and Wyoming

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is November 25th, 2024, and I want to talk a little bit more about our good friends in Wyoming. I received an email from the Wyoming Stable Token, which discussed the top seven finalists. There’s something I noticed that’s really interesting, especially now that we’re friends with the XRP community. The Wyoming Stable Coin Commission has initiated its procurement process for the Wyoming Stable Token (WST), which is expected to launch in 2025 as the first fiat-backed and fully reserved stable token issued by a public entity in the United States.

The commission intends to engage qualified third-party vendors to facilitate the development, deployment, and management of WST and the underlying reserves. They mentioned a request for qualification for those vendors, but here are the blockchain networks determined to be in scope for the initial deployment of the Wyoming Stable Coin: Solana, Avalanche, Stellar, and Ethereum, including layer 2 networks like Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. Let me get this straight: apparently, Stellar can do things that Ripple can’t do according to the scoring criteria. Ripple just announced the launch of RL USD, and the last time I checked, XRP had an $84 billion ecosystem with almost $12 billion in trading. It has all these amazing payment settlement capabilities, including that free CES for assets issued in the XRP Ledger.

Cardano was also excluded, with a $34 billion market cap and a $3.2 billion turnaround. Yet, Stellar, a variant of the protocol, was selected. Anthony Apollo, the executive director and former Consensus employee who also worked in the Polygon ecosystem, made that decision. It’s almost as if Consensus doesn’t get along so well with Ripple.

The scoring criteria from this blockchain selection working group was unilaterally decided, with no public process or determination. Typically, when you do these things, you publish a period of time for what you want your functional product requirements to be and how it has to perform. Then you invite anyone who wants to qualify to build a proof of concept and demonstrate that it satisfies those requirements. I’m really curious how Stellar has apparently more capabilities than Ripple and in what way, especially for the purpose of launching a stable coin. Ripple just launched one that seems to satisfy all those requirements, yet they were excluded from an $84 billion ecosystem that’s been around even longer than Cardano.

Algorand, Tezos, and Aptos were also excluded. Dozens of viable ecosystems were not even given a chance to build a proof of concept. The former Consensus employee made that decision. So, XRP community, Cardano and XRP are a lot closer these days, and I’m starting to really come around on a lot of the points you’ve been discussing. This situation smells fishy, doesn’t it?

As I mentioned in a prior video, we’ll get this sorted and cleaned up. It’s a shame because we all need counterbalances to Circle and Tether, and it seems like this is just an extension of that Circle ecosystem. One of the commissioners used to work for Circle; I believe she was the general counsel. Circle support was just announced, and interestingly, all the chains that were announced were Circle chains. Things are changing in 2025.

We don’t have any patience or tolerance for this type of behavior anymore. Opaque processes are not how we’re going to have a relationship with the government moving forward. I believe there are a lot of good-hearted people in the state of Wyoming who want to get this done. By the way, there might even be a class action because anyone excluded certainly has standing. This creates an unfair competitive advantage for those chains selected and an unfair disadvantage for those not selected.

Since it’s an opaque process and normal procurement wasn’t followed, it’s interesting how a small group of people, former Consensus employees and former Circle employees, can act as judge and executioner for what chains qualify with public funds and a public project. I would also like to point out that because of Cardano’s partnership with Boss Bitcoin OS, Cardano creates an opportunity for Bitcoin to have its first stable coin. However, this commission decided under these criteria to exclude Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by far, and the only one that the current president, who’s coming into power, Trump, is considering starting a strategic reserve for. It’s truly curious to me because I know how many people in Wyoming are team Bitcoin and team orange, and they were also excluded from this process. Bitcoin apparently is not allowed, but the Circle ecosystem is, by former Circle employees.

Go figure. So, XRP community, what to do, and we do too. We’re going to get this fixed one way or another. It’s not okay to use public funds to create an unfair competitive advantage for certain companies and ecosystems and to whitewash it as if it was an open process. For a year and a half, the lawmakers and the committee were directly aligned with the idea of publishing the standards.

As long as you could adhere to them and demonstrate that you could do that, you would qualify. Then suddenly, within a month, they shifted from that to scoring you themselves and just publishing who qualifies. I can’t for the life of me understand how Stellar qualifies but not Ripple, given the unique history. That would be like Litecoin qualifying but not Bitcoin. Does that make any sense to you?

Because we don’t qualify, we can’t even bid to build. We didn’t lose an RFP; we weren’t even allowed to participate. The entire XRP community is not allowed to participate, nor are the Algorand and Tezos communities. But all the things that Circle touches are, so says the former Consensus employee and now executive director who has decided to take this upon himself to decide for all of us with the taxpayer dollars of the state of Wyoming. This situation smells fishy to me.