Ripple CTO Blames Charles Hoskinson on SEC’s ETH ‘Popularity’

Ripple's chief technology officer, David Schwartz, has disputed the Cardano founder's comments about the possible reasons behind US regulators' ruling that Ether (ETH) is not safe.

Cardano's founder, Charles Hoskinson, spoke on the much-debated ETHgate theory at the AMA session on October 8, arguing that government actions are not about corruption.

It's a conspiracy theory that Ethereum has gotten a free pass from US regulators, particularly the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has reiterated its position that ETH is not a security for years.

Although SEC Director William Hinman declared Ether not to be a security in 2018, US regulators are struggling to establish the status of other coins, including XRP, which has created significant obstacles to their adoption.

According to Hoskinson, drafts of Hinman's speech on Ethereum's regulatory status – released in June 2023 – do not prove corruption, but bias.

“None of those activities presuppose corruption, just discrimination,” Hoskinson argued in the AMA, arguing that “that's how the Internet works and it can't be fixed now.”

The founder of Cardano emphasized that there is no evidence to prove anything but bias by the SEC. “What evidence do you have for this? Where are the emails? Where are the meetings?” Hoskinson asked. He also argued that XRP serves different clients, doesn't even have smart contracts, and has a completely different business model. He added:

“Wouldn't that completely defeat your goal of making Ethereum not secure enough to do that? Are you scared of what's going on with XRP? Do you really believe? If you do, you're a crazy person in my book.

Hoskinson's new EtiHagate-related comments quickly sparked a backlash from the XRP community, particularly executives like XRP's chief technology officer, Schwartz. The XRP community particularly clashed with Hoskinson over the definition of corruption.

“I would argue that it is corruption that a government actor shows bias in favor of themselves and their friends,” Schwartz wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on October 12.

“So to say the word ‘corruption' politely is ‘loving',” said one commenter on X.

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Some members of the community have also alleged that Hoskinson's questions about the ETHgate evidence may be related to the fact that there is much to hide about the early days of Ethereum.

In addition to his role at Cardano, Hoskinson is one of the eight co-founders of Ethereum alongside Vitalik Buterin, and he also briefly served as Ethereum's CEO between 2013 and 2014. Next in 2014 to launch Cardano.

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