Justin Bons, the founder and chief information officer of CyberCapital, has claimed that Ripple officials are misrepresenting XRP as a decentralised and permissionless network, reigniting the existing discussion concerning the centralization of XRP and XRPL.
According to Bons, the Unique Node Lists (UNLs), which are directories of reliable nodes maintained by centralised organisations like the XRPL Foundation, provide the basis for XRP’s consensus. A node is regarded as untrustworthy and is prohibited from taking part in the consensus if it is not on this list. Moreover, XRP is not trustless and goes against the fundamental tenets of a decentralised network since users must obtain authorization from dependable third parties selected by the XRPL Foundation.
Matt Hamilton, a former director of developer relations at Ripple, responded that each node is in charge of its own UNL and selects its contents. A community-emergent desire to utilise a non-Ripple UNL led to the creation of the XRPL Foundation’s UNL, he continued, and there is no central authority. He asserts that this refutes Bons’ assertions that the network has approval.
CTO of Ripple One of the designers of XRPL, David Schwartz, said that validators do not have any influence on the inclusion of transactions, but rather resolve the double-spend issue and choose which of two equally valid but competing transactions gets included. In consensus rounds, XRPL processes or defers transactions, and if any honest node notices a validator acting dishonestly, it ignores that validator. Additionally, the network is built on the idea of severing links between transactions that are both beneficial and contentious.
Since many weeks ago, both proponents and opponents of the centralization of XRP and XRPL have been vigorously defending their positions. Additionally, according to a prior statement by Bons, Bitcoin (BTC) is not a decentralised network.
