Quite recently, Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of Stellar as well as the co-founder of Ripple, was seen in a heated conversation with David Schwartz, current Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of Ripple.

Schwartz attacked the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) with a sarcastic response to one of the XRP holders who was displeased with price of XRP. The statement was fashioned to attack the recent action by the SDF where they burned 50% of the total XLM tokens.

SDF, the non-profit organization that supports the development of the stellar blockchain, announced on November 4, that a total of 50 billion XLM tokens were now in existence compared to the 105 billion prior to the burn.

The company stated that they plan on using the remainder of the funds to develop the Stellar blockchain, foster use cases, and support network partnerships. The announcement further stated that SDF has also reduced the funding that was allocated for community giveaways from 68 billion to 4 billion as 50 billion of that has been burnt.

This announcement stirred distrust among the XLM community and many spoke ill of SDF. Leo Cheng, the co-founder & CEO of Machi X, even said the XLM is useless as a utility token and burning half the supply of something that’s “worth zero still makes it zero.”

The company however clarified that the reason for the token burn was that this would “allow SDF to carry less weight, too–we’re just a piece of a much larger whole, and the funds we steward should reflect that.”

David Schwartz is known to have been quite harsh on Stellar. Earlier this year, in a Quora Q&A session held by the Ripple CTO, Schwartz made some interesting comments regarding Stellar’s partnership with IBM.

The two enterprises which were collaborating to allow banks to launch their stablecoins on the Stellar blockchain. This effort “misses the point of blockchain completely” responded Schwartz, he believes that this doesn’t solve the “centralization issue.”

This time, David Schwartz reposted a video of himself on a plane after the Swell conference in Singapore titled:

“We had so much fun making this video! #SwellbyRipple is over for now. I’m off to Tokyo.”

One of the users responded to this by mentioning the current price of XRP, as for a long time the XRP community has been displeased about Ripple dumping huge amounts of their XRP holdings causing the price to plummet. The user named ‘John ripple’ wrote:

“No Fun here at 25 cents”

Schwartz was pretty quick to respond to this in a sarcastic tone indirectly referring to the XLM token burn, which many believe to have been an effort to pump the price of Stellar Lumens. Schwartz said:

“Too bad XRP is decentralized or someone could just burn half the supply and raise the price to 29 cents.”

Things heated up really quickly when Jed McCaleb joined the conversation claiming that Ripple Labs can also burn XRP tokens. He wrote:

“Wtf are you talking about. Ripple labs can burn half the XRP supply.”

Schwartz did accept this fact that XRP can be burned by paying it as a fee or by sending it to an account whose “public key hash has insufficient entropy to have a corresponding private key anyone could ever find.”

However, Schwartz responded saying:

Thanks! I'll keep that in mind if we ever find that nothing we're doing is working. — David Schwartz (@JoelKatz) November 9, 2019

Prior to this, there were various speculations as to whether Ripple would also be burning some of its holdings, but many believe that since Ripple doesn’t control XRP, they cannot burn XRP tokens like Stellar. This fact has questioned Stellar’s decentralized nature.

It is not just Schwartz that has condemned the Stellar Foundation. The creator of Litecoin, Charlie Lee mentioned that this move was an effort for the SDF to enrich its holding. He wrote: