Ripple CTO David Schwartz has said that the XRP Ledger (XRPL) was deliberately designed so that neither the company nor any single entity could control it.<\/p>\n
His remarks came hours after Cyber Capital founder Justin Bons argued that XRPL is effectively permissioned and centralized, with the exchange cutting to a long-running debate in crypto over what decentralization actually means and whether validator lists amount to hidden control.<\/p>\n
Bons wrote<\/a> in a February 24 thread on X that networks such as Ripple, Stellar, Hedera, Canton, and Algorand rely on permissioned elements. He claimed XRPL\u2019s Unique Node List, or UNL, gives Ripple and its foundation \u201cabsolute power and control over the chain,\u201d arguing that divergence from the published list could cause a fork.<\/p>\n However, Schwartz rejected<\/a> that characterization, calling it \u201cobjectively nonsensical.\u201d He said XRPL nodes individually decide which validators to trust and will not agree to double-spends or censorship unless their operators explicitly choose to.<\/p>\n If a validator attempts to censor or double-spend, \u201can honest node would just count it as one validator that it did not agree with,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n However, Schwartz acknowledged<\/a> that validators could conspire to halt the chain from the perspective of honest nodes but said they could not force double-spends. In such a case, node operators could switch to a different UNL, which he compared to changing the mining algorithm in Bitcoin after a majority attack.<\/p>\n The XRPL co-architect also addressed<\/a> regulatory pressure, noting that Ripple must comply with U.S. court orders and cannot refuse them. For that reason, he argued, XRPL was intentionally built so that Ripple itself could not censor transactions.<\/p>\n \u201cThe best way to be able to say \u2018no\u2019 is to have to say \u2018no\u2019 because you cannot do the thing asked,\u201d Schwartz wrote.<\/p>\n The exchange comes as XRPL activity metrics have shown significant declines, with analyst Arthur reporting<\/a> on February 23 that active users fell to roughly 38,000 from more than 200,000, while payment volume dropped to about 80 million XRP from over 2.5 billion.<\/p>\n However, the on-chain observer attributed the drop to the February 18 activation of XLS-81, a permissioned decentralized exchange system that moves institutional transactions off public dashboards.<\/p>\n Questions about validator power also surfaced late last year, when Schwartz proposed<\/a> a two-tier staking model intended to add rewards without concentrating influence in Ripple\u2019s hands. The idea involved a separate governance token to manage validator lists, with the option to fork if governance failed.<\/p>\n For now, the February 25 exchange highlights a familiar divide. Critics argue that publishing validator lists creates soft control, even if anyone can technically run a node. However, Schwartz maintains that XRPL\u2019s consensus model was built to limit the power of validators and companies alike, even if that means Ripple itself cannot intervene when pressured.<\/p>\n The post Ripple CTO Details Why XRPL Prevents Any Single Entity from Owning the Chain<\/a> appeared first on CryptoPotato<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ripple CTO David Schwartz has said that the XRP Ledger (XRPL) was deliberately designed so that neither the company nor any single entity could control it. His remarks came hours after Cyber Capital founder Justin Bons argued that XRPL is effectively permissioned and centralized, with the exchange cutting to a long-running debate in crypto over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":138007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138006"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/138007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Regulatory Pressures and Network Resilience<\/h2>\n