According to Matt Hamilton, nothing stops Ripple from burning all the XRP stored in the company’s escrow wallet if it wants to.
Matt Hamilton, software developer and former Principal Developer Advocate at Ripple, recently disclosed that Ripple could actually burn all the XRP tokens currently stored in the company’s escrow wallets if it decides to.
Hamilton, who worked in the developer relations unit at Ripple for over a year, made this disclosure while addressing comments regarding the company’s XRP tokens and their significance in the ongoing litigation with the US SEC.
According to him, Ripple could decide to disable the master key for the accounts that are programmed to receive the escrowed tokens when they are released.
The escrows are set to release to a particular address. Ripple could at any time disable the master key on the destination account. Thus rendering it inoperable. Ie when the funds released from escrow they’d be inaccessible to anyone.
— Matt Hamilton (@HammerToe) May 14, 2023
This would make the released tokens inaccessible to anyone, including Ripple.
“Ripple could right now publicly and probably render their entire future escrow funds inaccessible to even themselves. To all intents and purposes, “burn them,” Hamilton stressed.
Could Ripple Be Ordered to Burn All XRP in Escrow?
Hamilton’s disclosure came on the back of an argument triggered by the SEC vs. LBRY lawsuit. Notably, in its lawsuit against LBRY Inc, the SEC requested that the court prohibit LBRY from carrying out any offerings related to digital assets until it has destroyed all the LBRY Credits (LBC) tokens it currently possesses.
An XRP proponent asked David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO if Ripple must do the same with the escrowed XRP tokens. A debate ensued, with some parties claiming that neither the court nor the SEC can make Ripple burn the escrowed tokens.
Others pointed out that XRPL validators could vote to burn the tokens if a consensus is reached, citing previous disclosures from Schwartz. As previously reported by The Crypto Basic, Schwartz confirmed in December 2020 that if validators vote to have the escrowed XRP tokens burned, Ripple will have no choice but to burn them.
Responding to the recent remarks on validator consensus, some individuals further stressed that Ripple could influence validators on the XRPL to vote in favor of the burn if the judge orders it.
Pro-XRP lawyer Bill Morgan disclosed that while the judge can make such an order, the validators would not be bound by it. Morgan emphasized that if Judge Analisa Torres extends the order to XRPL validators, she will have to give them a hearing before they can be bound to obey it.
Recall that Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, affirmed in an interview in April 2021 that the Silicon Valley firm could consider burning all the XRP tokens in its escrow wallets if the move would “make sense for the XRP ecosystem.”
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