Ripple’s Move To Privacy: How A Re-organization Of The XRP Ledger Will Affect The Network

Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has laid out a rare look at how the XRP Ledger could respond if it ever came under pressure from a state-level actor.

The discussion started with a question about whether an authoritarian regime could use or attack the XRP Ledger by targeting its validator network. Schwartz did not dismiss the risk entirely, and according to him, if the pressure ever became serious enough, the XRP Ledger could be reorganized around a more resilient validator structure.

State-Level Attacks May Only Disrupt XRPL Temporarily

The XRP Ledger has operated without a major outage across more than 70 million closed ledgers, but that reliability record may soon be tested in ways its creators never anticipated, one of which may be authoritarian regimes and state-level interference. 

Schwartz acknowledged that the threat to blockchain networks from state actors is real. State-level actors, he said, could cause temporary disruptions to blockchains, including the XRP Ledger, but long-term damage is a different matter entirely. The responses were made to a question on the social media platform X, where an XRP community member asked if an authoritarian regime like Putin’s would co-opt or disrupt the UNL/validator network to weaponize the ledger.

However, according to the Ripple CTO emeritus, long-term control from external forces would be much harder if the broader XRPL community stays active enough to respond. Ripple-run validators account for less than 20% of the total network, which means any concentrated attack on Ripple’s own infrastructure would leave the validator set intact. 

The XRPL network’s survival in that type of scenario would depend less on whether one validator is attacked and more on whether the network can keep replacing compromised or pressured operators. The attack would only become truly serious if a hostile actor could make people too afraid to run validators at all.

How Reorganizing The XRP Ledger Will Affect The Network

Schwartz also described a possible longer-term change to XRPL’s consensus structure in the event of an attack by an authoritarian regime. His example was a two-layer consensus algorithm, where the inner layer will handle normal network activity, and the outer layer will only come into play when the network needs to change the Unique Node List (UNL) of the inner layer.

The inner validators would keep the XRP Ledger running day to day. If those validators were attacked or compromised, the effect would be minimal, as they will be easily replaced. The outer validators would serve a lighter and less frequent role, stepping in mainly when changes are needed to the validator set.

Targeting the outer validators would also be harder because they would not need to operate constantly in the same visible way. They could be kept lightweight, appear only when needed, and operate through anonymizing services such as Tor or I2P.