The FUD Stompers: Like It or Not, XRP Army Is Winning Crypto's Hashtag War

A few big names will quickly become familiar - XRP Trump, Hodor, Tiffany Hayen, Bank XRP. Seemingly nothing happens in the world of XRP without these accounts knowing about it, and if they happen to miss an update, there are dozens of other accounts standing ready to flag it.

There's a whole constellation of forums, blogs and YouTube channels that feed an XRP-hungry audience, but Twitter is arguably the hub for the XRP community, and several people I spoke to created Twitter accounts for the first time just to participate in the XRP conversation.

XRP Twitter is perpetually abuzz up with discussion about the merits of XRP and the challenges - none of them insuperable, of course - that it faces on the road to mass adoption in cross-border payments and beyond.

"Aggressive XRP members," XRP Yoda told me, channeling his namesake's syntactic quirks, "I have not seen any."

The initial goal was to raise 5,000 XRP but, he said, "We blew through that," bringing in over 24,000 XRP at the time of writing, as well as nearly $3,400 in fiat.

The critics have a few favorite talking points: XRP is an unregistered security issued by Ripple; it's a "Banker coin," a cynical effort by the financial powers that be to co-opt a budding revolution; it's a worthless "Shitcoin"; it's being dumped on naive retail investors in a "Never-ending ICO"; Ripple has full control over the ledger, including the ability to freeze it; Ripple can release the XRP it's locked in escrow on a whim; the list goes on.

For XRP Trump, it was that random account that pitched the idea of suing "FUDDesk," which I naively - in his estimation - believed was an authentic XRP supporter.

Here's why 589-ers might cause XRP enthusiasts some reputational harm: they predict - "Preach" might be a better word - that the price of XRP will be $589.00 or higher at the end of 2018.

Few XRP accounts are as prolific as "Grega," but it is an extreme example of a pattern: nameless, faceless, often short-lived XRP monomaniacs who do not gripe about politics or make fun of celebrities or do anything at all but signal-boost bullish messages about XRP. In many cases the signal-boosting is clearly manual; not every sockpuppet is necessarily a bot.

Whatever the extent, nature, intent or provenance of XRP Twitter's alleged astroturfing, many in the XRP community are enraged by Golberg's allegations.