- Cyber Capital’s Justin Bons says XRPL’s UNL makes validators effectively permissioned.
- Bons groups XRPL with other ledgers he views as partially permissioned.
- David Schwartz defends XRPL architecture and intent to avoid single-party control.
- Schwartz says UNL prevents attack vectors without enabling censorship or double-spending.
A public spat has erupted in the cryptocurrency space after Cyber Capital founder and Chief Investment Officer (CIO) Justin Bons claimed the XRP Ledger (XRPL) is not a decentralized system.
Bons tweeted that the XRP ledger is “essentially permissioned” due to the Unique Node List (UNL), which contains a selection of validator nodes that are chosen by the protocol. According to Bons, this means that companies like Ripple and other affiliated parties, “hold a disproportionate amount of control” over the XRPL.
To create a truly decentralized system, the crypto space needs to ensure that “a blockchain is 100% permissionless,” and the community “needs to apply pressure for this to happen.”
Centralization Charge From Cyber Capital
In his post, Bons mentions that one factor indicating that validators in a blockchain are not truly decentralized but “functionally permissioned and under central control” is the Unique Node List (UNL) of the XRP Ledger (XRPL).
He then classifies XRPL and other systems, such as: – Canton by DLT Lab – Stellar – Hedera – Algorand as partial permissioned ledgers.
In his opinion, all consensus algorithms other than Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) can be reduced to a simple Proof of Authority (PoA). The permissioned elements of a blockchain system are contrary to the fundamental principles of crypto.
XRP Ledger Defenders Challenge that Framing
David Schwartz, the chief architect of the XRP Ledger and the former CTO of Ripple, has been firing back at the common conspiracy theory about the United Network List (UNL). According to Schwartz, the XRP Ledger was deliberately designed to be a fully decentralized system not controlled by either Ripple or any other entity.
The regulations in place at the time of the XRP Ledger’s release were also a factor in its design. In his explanation of the UNL, Schwartz claims that the list was used to prevent denial-of-service attacks due to unbounded validator growth and to allow a node to determine when consensus had actually been reached.
Furthermore, Schwartz rebutted the idea that a validator can push a double-spend or a censorship attack. His main point was that every node in the ledger is supposed to follow the protocol rules and that the validation done by trusted validators is necessary for the transactions to be valid.
He also agrees that in case of a coordinated attack by the majority of the nodes, it is possible to split the network so that the honest nodes cannot reach consensus, but he also argues that in such a situation a dishonest node wouldn’t be able to do a successful double spend attack because other nodes would still validate transactions signed by different validators, and that the network can always choose a different UNL (unsettled nodes list) to fix the issue.
He also notes that the XRPL’s consensus rounds last about 5 seconds, reducing the likelihood that a transaction is a replay or a conflict.
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