Ripple CTO Emeritus David “JoelKatz” Schwartz dismissed claims that the XRP Ledger (XRPL) has been successfully centralized, after Cyber Capital founder and CIO Justin Bons argued that XRPL’s Unique Node List (UNL) structure makes validators “permissive” and gives discretionary power over Ripple & amp;
The exchange, sparked by Bons’ extensive series calling for the industry to “reject all centralized ‘blockchains’,” quickly boiled down to a technical dispute over what XRPL validators can and cannot do and what “control” means in a system that relies on selective validation lists instead of Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake.
The XRP Ledger Centralization Allegation
In his post, Bons grouped Ripple alongside Canton, Stellar, Hedera, and Algorand as networks with permissioned or partially permissioned elements. His charge against XRPL was straightforward: because XRPL nodes usually depend on the published UNL, “any split from this published list in the middle would cause a fork,” which in his opinion puts power in the hands of whoever publishes that list.
Bons framed it as a binary question: “either there is full consent or it is not” and argued that even partial consent is a breach of contract. He also extended criticism to the broader thesis of institutional adoption: banks and stakeholders may like regulated environments, but “those institutions will be left behind,” while “crypto natives” win by building and operating fully permissionless systems.
Schwartz’s opening objection attacked the concept of Bons’ “absolute power” framework. “‘…effectively giving the Ripple Foundation and company complete power and control over the chain…” Schwartz wrote, calling it “as pure nonsense as claiming that someone with a lot of mining power can create a billion bitcoins.”
Bons responded that he wasn’t referring to extortion or embezzlement, but emphasized that influencing the majority is still important. “They can’t steal funds, either, but they can double-check and check,” Bons said. “Also, it’s exactly the same when someone controls most of the mining power in BTC.” He then suggested that they talk live on the podcast.
Schwartz rejected the mechanics of equality, insisting that XRPL nodes don’t accept censorship or double spending just because a validator says so. “That is not true. XRPL and BTC do not work in the same way,” Schwartz wrote. “You count the number of verifiers that agree with your node and your node won’t accept to spend a double fee or check unless, for some reason, you want it.”
He continued the point in many posts, relying on a simple intuition: an untrustworthy validator is not an oracle; it’s just one vote. “If an authenticator tries to spend money twice or clarify, the trusted node will automatically count as one authenticator that does not agree with it.”
What Schwartz Says What a Real Attack Looks Like
Schwartz acknowledged that there is still a failure mode, but described it as a lifestyle problem rather than a situation of theft or double spending. “Verifiers can conspire to stop this chain by looking at trusted nodes,” he said. “But that’s the equivalent of XRPL and an untrusted majority attack except they never used double currency. The solution is to choose a new UNL just like with BTC you’ll need to choose a new mining algorithm.”
He also disputed the power record issues, comparing XRPL to other major networks. “Effective evidence tells the story,” Schwartz wrote. “Transactions are discriminated all the time in BTC. Transactions are brutally rescheduled or processed all the time in ETH. Nothing like this has ever happened in XRPL transactions and it’s hard to imagine how it could happen.”
Schwartz later laid out a more detailed description of XRPL’s consensus model, emphasizing rapid cycles of “live consensus”—”every five seconds”—where validators vote whether a transaction is included now or deferred to the next round. In that framework, the main requirement of the system is not irrational trust in the verifiers, but agreement on whether the work has been seen before termination.
He pointed out that XRPL needs a UNL for two reasons: to prevent an attacker from issuing unlimited guarantees that force excessive activity, and to prevent validators from simply not participating in a way that makes consensus impossible to scale. “That’s it. There is no control or governance here other than to coordinate the implementation of new features,” Schwartz wrote, adding that verifiers cannot force a node to enforce rules that do not have its own code.
Schwartz closed with a long, unusually clear reason: that the architecture of XRPL was deliberately designed to reduce Ripple’s ability to comply with audit demands, even if Ripple itself wants to be honest.
“We carefully and deliberately designed XRPL so that we could not control it,” he wrote. “Ripple, for example, has to respect US court orders. They can’t say no… We absolutely decided that we do NOT want control and that it would be in our best interest not to be able to control that.”
He added a vague motivational argument: even if Ripple can block or double use, using that power will destroy trust in XRPL and therefore destroy the network’s utility. “And the best way to say ‘no’ is to say ‘no’ because you can’t do what you asked for,” Schwartz wrote.
At press time, XRP traded at $1.3766.
The featured image was created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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