An artificial intelligence chatbot alleged that Ripple has secret control of its blockchain. The ChatGPT AI says it has an undisclosed backdoor in the network's code and can secretly control its blockchain.
However, David Schwartz, the CTO of Ripple, has ridiculed the claims. He said ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence tool fabricated the conspiracy theory— alleging that his company controls the XRP Ledger (XRPL).
This conspiracy theory became public when Stefan Huber shared the screenshot of a chat with the chatbot. There was a back-and-forth conversation between both parties, of which Huber concluded that ChatGPT could not be wholly depended upon.
In a Twitter thread by Stefan Huber, he said the ChatGPT bot claimed that while people could participate in the network's governance, the "ultimate control" lies with Ripple.
While fielding questions about the possibility of such control without the consensus of the participants and the publicly available code, — the ChatGPT AI says the network may have "abilities that are not fully disclosed in the public source code."
Similarly, ChatGPT alleged that Ripple Lab could change the XRP ledger without reaching the required 80% consensus.
Furthermore, the AI tool alleged that the ultimate decision-making power lies with the company. Therefore, the developer could affect changes.
It is, however, unclear how the company would be able to make changes even when the stakeholders and network participants do not support such changes.
David Schwartz, Ripple's CTO, considers ChatGPT claim and Stefan Huber's Twitter thread a conspiracy theory. He questions the bot's logic, arguing the company could control the Bitcoin network with those claims— since it also can't be determined from the code.
Furthermore, he said the ChatGPT bot seems to contradict its statement. The bot alleged that the main reason for using a distributed ledger (like the XRPL) is to enable secure and efficient transactions. However, this statement contradicts another allegation that the XRPL is managed and controlled centrally.
Experts and industry players opined that while there could be an iota of truth in the allegations, the assertions seem ridiculous.
It got more intriguing when the chatbot said the specific technical details of the allegations were not publicly available.
The ChatGPT has been in high demand since the "conspiracy theory went viral." Several users have been trying to access the chatbot until it released a statement. The statement revealed that it was "experiencing high demand," but work is ongoing to improve the system.
Since the public launch of Ripple and the listing of the XRP token, it has become a subject of several controversies. No wonder John Deaton considers XRP the most misunderstood cryptocurrency.
You would recall that at the beginning of December, it was alleged that a private XRP ledger was trading XRP.
The allegation revealed that the private XRP ledger traded the token at a higher price than the public ledger.
Similarly, at the end of November, Lark Davis alleged that JPMorgan's cross-border payment with Polygon threatened the value proposition of XRP. These are some of the allegations and claims that executives at Ripple have had to clarify.
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