Ripple CTO to Critics: XRP Ledger Fulfills Blockchain Criteria

Ripple CTO David Schwartz has stepped forward to address a critical discourse surrounding XRP Ledger. In response to tweets, Schwartz makes the case that XRP Ledger not only meets but exceeds the foundational criteria of blockchain technology.

The debate over what constitutes a “true” blockchain has been a contentious one, with purists and innovators often at odds.

In this regard, XRP’s classification as a blockchain remains a subject of discussion, with critics pointing to various aspects of XRP Ledger, including its unique consensus mechanism, as reasons to doubt its status as a decentralized blockchain. XRP Ledger utilizes a unique consensus algorithm called the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA), which relies on a group of trusted validators to authenticate and validate transactions.

In one such discourse, an X user claimed that XRP was not a blockchain but rather a distributed ledger. The X user also stated that because transaction hashes are linked, it could be “called” a blockchain, but it was different from traditional proof-of-work (POW) or proof-of-stake (POS) decentralized blockchains.

I think XRPL meets the definition of a blockchain. But if people want to disagree, that’s cool too.https://t.co/RUbEAiXbQu pic.twitter.com/zZwMeEFczW

— David “JoelKatz” Schwartz (@JoelKatz) March 31, 2024

Schwartz, one of the original architects of XRP Ledger, maintains that XRPL meets the definition of a blockchain. To back his assertion, Schwartz shares a screenshot of a statement from one of his earlier blog entries from 2018, in which he outlined what a blockchain is.

According to Schwartz, “A blockchain is a series of states of a distributed ledger where each state, except the first, contains a secure reference to the prior state and sufficient information to demonstrate that the transition from that prior state is valid according to the system’s rules.”

On the other hand, a distributed ledger is a database that has no single authoritative copy. That is, the integrity of the data does not depend on the source of the data but on the contents of the data.

Despite Schwartz’s explanation, some critics are likely to remain skeptical of XRP’s classification as a blockchain, which he appears indifferent to, saying, “But if people want to disagree, that’s cool too.”

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