Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz says a new XRP Ledger (XRPL) upgrade will be a game changer.
Each server in the XRPL has a “unique node list” (UNL) containing its list of validators.
The new upgrade will account for validators that may be offline or malfunctioning due to hardware maintenance, internet issues, attacks, and/or external circumstances like natural disasters.
According to the XRPL website,
“The ‘Negative UNL’ is a list of trusted validators which are believed to be offline or malfunctioning, as declared by a consensus of the remaining validators. Validators in the Negative UNL are ignored for determining if a new ledger version has attained a consensus.”
Schwartz says the upgrade, which can currently be used in test networks but is not yet available as an amendment to the XRP Ledger protocol, will make it easier to enable more diverse validators.
“When choosing a validator, performance is not the only criterion. Jurisdiction, institutional commitment, network redundancy, commitment to the network, and many other factors have to go into that.
The biggest advantage of the negative UNL proposal is that it will make it much easier to say ‘yes’ to more diverse validators, even if they are running on a single residential connection with a tiny machine in someone’s living room.”
The Ripple CTO highlights that the negative UNL can also enhance XRPL’s decentralization.
“It significantly reduces the risks associated with adding more validators, allowing us to improve decentralization without risking liveness.”
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