Ripple CTO Says XRP Ledger is More Decentralized than PoW Blockchains

The question of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) being a centralized network was recently brought forward for argument. Accordingly, David Schwartz, the chief technology officer at Ripple stepped in to draw attention to some clarifications earlier rendered.

Per a November tweet, Justin Bons, the founder of Cyber Capital popularly known as Europe’s oldest cryptocurrency fund, claimed that the XRP Ledger founded in 2012 by a trio of Bitcoin early adopters is not decentralized. 

According to him, the XRPL is established on the concepts of permissioned nodes and does not depend on any of the popular decentralized blockchain consensus algorithms such as proof of work or proof of stake for operations. 

Bons added that Ripple executives are only misleading users to believe the project is decentralized. He wrote, “I thought it was common knowledge that Ripple is centralized. Turns out their community is being lied to & misled by Ripple executives. Convincing them that XRP is decentralized! When in reality, it is based on permissioned nodes explicitly selected by the XRP foundation.”

Schwartz’s attention was taken back to these assertions made by Bons by a certain XRP community member on Friday. 

To clarify the issue, the Ripple CTO noted that XRPL possesses all the properties and features exhibited by other top decentralized consensus mechanisms such as PoW and PoS, adding that the XRPL only achieves consensus differently. 

He wrote, “PoW blockchains are decentralized because everyone enforces the rules, nobody has any special power to change the rules, and it is not possible to censor transactions other than over very short periods of time. XRPL has all these properties, but achieves them differently.”

He added that XRPL’s model makes it extra cheap for users to use, making it a more decentralized network compared to PoW or PoS chains. “… This makes XRPL cheap — there’s no PoW or PoS to pay for. And I do think this makes better decentralization because nobody has any special right to receive rewards or control transaction flow,” he wrote. 

As published, Schwartz also noted that Ripple’s ultimate aim of selling off its massive XRP holdings is to achieve broad distribution of the token following other opinions that the Silicon Valley tech company holds too much of XRP total supply.

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