Ripple CTO Details Why XRPL prevents a single entity from owning the chain

David Schwartz says the XRP Ledger is deliberately designed to prevent Ripple or any other actor from controlling the chain.

Ripple CTO David Schwartz has said that the XRP Ledger (XRPL) was deliberately designed in such a way that neither the company nor any entity could control it.

His comments came hours after Cyber ​​Capital founder Justin Bons argued that XRPL is effectively permissioned and centralized, with the exchange sparking a long-running debate in crypto over what decentralization actually means and whether validator lists amount to hidden control.

Clash over control and the unique node list

Beans wrote in a February 24 thread on X that networks such as Ripple, Stellar, Hedera, Canton and Algorand rely on allowed elements. He claimed that XRPL’s Unique Node List, or UNL, gives Ripple and its foundation “absolute power and control over the chain,” arguing that deviations from the published list could trigger a fork.

However, Schwartz rejected that characterization, calling it “objectively nonsensical.” He said XRPL nodes individually decide which validators to trust and will not agree to double-spending or censorship unless their operators explicitly choose to do so.

If a validator tries to censor or double-spend, “an honest node would simply consider it a validator it disagreed with,” he wrote.

However, Schwartz recognized that validators could conspire to stop the chain from the perspective of honest nodes, but said they could not enforce double-spending. In such a case, node operators could switch to another UNL, which he likened to changing the mining algorithm in Bitcoin after a majority attack.

Also the XRPL co-architect addressed regulatory pressure, noting that Ripple must comply with U.S. court orders and cannot refuse them. For that reason, he argued, XRPL was deliberately built so that Ripple itself could not censor transactions.

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“The best way to be able to say ‘no’ is to have to say ‘no’ because you cannot do what is asked,” Schwartz wrote.

Regulatory pressure and network resilience

The exchange comes as XRPL activity metrics have shown significant declines, with analyst Arthur reporting on February 23 that the number of active users fell from over 200,000 to around 38,000, while payment volume fell from over 2.5 billion to around 80 million XRP.

However, the on-chain observer attributed the drop to the Feb. 18 activation of XLS-81, an authorized decentralized exchange system that removes institutional transactions from public dashboards.

Questions about the power of the validator also surfaced late last year, when Schwartz proposed a two-tier staking model, intended to add rewards without concentrating influence in Ripple’s hands. The idea included a separate governance token to manage validator lists, with the option to split if governance failed.

For now, the February 25 exchange highlights a familiar divide. Critics argue that publishing validator lists creates soft control, even if anyone can technically run a node. However, Schwartz claims that XRPL’s consensus model is built to limit the power of both validators and companies, even if that means Ripple itself cannot intervene when pressure is put on it.