Ripple’s website is currently offline two days after the platform said it would quarantine 55 bln XRP ($14 bln) tokens to provide “market certainty.”
A blog post announced the move Tuesday but is currently unavailable as Ripple’s website returns a ‘502 Bad Gateway’ error at press time Thursday.
Circulating the blog post, introductory comments sent to Cointelegraph referred to the need to lock up the funds primarily to reassure investors against a sudden sell-off.
“By giving investors a predictable supply schedule, we’re removing any question or concern about the large-scale sale of XRP that could drive prices down,” PR material stated.
Ripple will use an escrow feature to release one bln XRP per month for “its use,” with any unspent coins put back into quarantine.
The move attracted further criticism over the platform’s entire ethos, commentators repeating accusations of insufficient decentralization which have dogged the project since its inception.
“The fact that Ripple can lock up $14 bln by itself shows that the $16 bln XRP market cap isn't the number you should care about,” Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd tweeted in response to the news quoting Cointelegraph journalist Joseph Young.
The fact that Ripple can lock up $14 billion by itself shows that the $16 billion XRP market cap isn't number you should care about. https://t.co/5bNj3UBlRx
— Peter Todd (@petertoddbtc) May 17, 2017
The value of Ripple’s XRP token had previously increased exponentially - by almost 500 percent in a matter of weeks.