>>20218415where the fuck are xrpl developers supposed to get the money to travel to amsterdam and pay for hotels for a week? lmao nobody in the XRPL dev community has made any fucking money in the last 4 years unless they have been running outright scams.
and no VC will touch the XRPL with a 10 foot pole because of the lawsuit and because it's seen as the corporate banker dystopia chain run by the company making billions off dumping tokens on holders
(ironically this describes Consensys and every single ETH ecosystem L2 and foundation to a T but Ripple is 100% the redheaded stepchild of crypto and it is absolute ratpoison for a project seeking to raise to say they are building on XRPL)
>>20216528personally my leading candidates for who runs the XRPL ARG are:
1. 42 Entertainment
2. Mullen Lowe
3. A google marketing contractor
4. a contractor related to Thiel mafia
(remember, google and founder's fund were seed round investors in Ripple/Opencoin)
5. some entity one degree/half a degree removed from one of the above
the ARG was likely conceived around 2016 and implemented 2017 when BearableGuy, BabaCugs, Ripple Riddler, initial social media posts like Megalodon Anon, MrPool, Kendra Hill were activated and started engaging with users, dropping breadcrumbs
if you read the literature on ARGs, the way they rolled it out is textbook for a puzzle-based viral marketing/community engagement scheme.
they needed a way to keep people interested in and investing in XRP so retail traffic would provide a smokescreen for ripple's movements and so it's not a complete ghostchain while the plumbing was being laid for the multilateral cross-currency settlement system to be implemented in the upcoming planned controlled demolition of the world economy. this is a matter of national security so i would not be surprised at all if military/contractors are involved and under NDA.
whoever's behind it has considerable power, connections and resources on an international level.