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David Schwartz wants to give the crypto community a peek into what the XRP Ledger could potentially look like in the future.
In a new blog post, the Ripple chief technology officer says enhancements will likely focus on the consensus algorithm, performance and research consumption, and additional features like an XRP-collateralized stablecoin.
He says the company wants to hear input from the XRP community regarding their proposed improvements to the ledger and what they’d like to see prioritized.
In terms of the ledger’s consensus protocol, Schwartz explains that currently, when servers lose their sync with the network, they are forced to re-synchronize and simultaneously fetch all the ledgers they missed.
Subsequently, they’re required to build forward in order to rebuild any missing intermediary ledgers.
“We propose that the design be changed to support a fetch operation that fetches a ledger’s header and all the transactions in the ledger in order.
This will allow a server to play forward from the preceding ledger to the queried ledger with minimal network traffic. When a server loses synch, it can then collect validations to determine the ledgers it needs to go forward from its last-validated ledger to the current ledger.
Schwartz also wants to upgrade from one to two separate consensus layers, with one layer focused exclusively on advancing the ledger and the other handling fee and rule changes as well as participant management.
“With this design, a small set of validators selected by the larger set of validators would ensure the network makes reliable forward progress and does not engage in censorship. The larger set of validators would police the smaller set to ensure they are in fact making progress and are not censoring. Any validators in the small set that are not behaving would be voted out by the large set.”
Some XRP Ledger issues don’t yet have a tangible solution, according to the Ripple official. For example, the company wants to reduce the ledger software’s high level of memory consumption, but it doesn’t yet know exactly how to.
Ripple also wants to add code to the server to keep track of when a transaction is first observed and what fee level it chose to pay, allowing the server to update its stats regarding transactions at that fee level.
See the full list of potential improvements here.