The startup, which controls the development of the third largest cryptocurrency in the world, XRP, decides to update the underlying technology.
Ripple, a San Francisco-based startup, released two new white papers yesterday for peer review: one describes the XRP consensus algorithm in a more formal way, and the second talks about increasing the variety of connections for each node and the software that users run to transfer and verify transactions on the network.
Together, these steps show that Ripple, in which banks such as English Santander and Japanese SBI have invested, is ready to invest in the underlying cryptocurrency infrastructure, whose capitalization, despite some questions for the company, now amounts to almost $ 40 billion.
Nevertheless, although XRP has become one of the most sought-after crypto assets, in some respects its development lags behind other, more mature cryptocurrencies - bitcoin and ether.
In fact, CTO Stefan Thomas wants to show that these white paper is a step towards developing a closer relationship between the company's research department and academia. In short, the startup wants it easier for researchers to keep track of Ripple technology, making it easier to contribute.
In an interview, Thomas tried to emphasize how these documents open up the possibility of further increasing the network effect around the technology, which can be extremely important given the current market situation.
Thomas told CoinDesk:
“This is the first time we have published peer-reviewed scientific articles. Obviously, this paves the way for future research. I think in the future you will hear much more about how we interact with the scientific community. ”
In a broader sense, this can be considered probably the first attempt to update and improve the documentation of the open source platform (this is the first work with 2014 of the year when the XRP Ledger, later called the Ripple Consensus Ledger) was described.
Also, these documents are a statement that the evolution of Ripple continues. Once launched with the goal of making cryptocurrency a secure payment network, Ripple is now striving to replace the services of centralized banks with decentralized alternatives.
Defense game
For Thomas, the two documents have one central theme - security.
«We are trying to add protection against some unlikely attack scenarios. In general, this suggests that you cannot manipulate the entire network”, He explained.
The key word here is "unlikely." Thomas argues that these attack vectors are not viable unless the attacker works for a state, say, the US government, which has enough money and technological resources to damage the network. And although he is not particularly worried about this, Thomas said that the startup is still trying to defend itself against this.
«We are extremely careful, we want a better level of security"He added.
The first document, entitled “Analysis of the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol”, is based on the 2014 white paper of the year and formally proves mathematically that what is supposed to happen on the net will really happen. It all comes down to two guarantees: “security” (the network will not fork in two competing networks) and “viability” (the network will not get stuck and will continue to process transactions).
The second document, “Cobalt: BFT Management in Open Networks,” aims to improve previous XRP plans for an algorithm that supports a richer array of validators.
You can look at XRP as a voting system, where each node that stores the Ripple transaction history has a vote on what happens next. To help implement this, each node has a so-called Unique Node List (UNL).
Thus, if each node is connected to a variety of nodes, this is beneficial for long-term fault tolerance and network decentralization.
Both documents are largely related to distributed systems — they describe how large, connected networks work. And since they are more inclined toward theory, Thomas emphasized that documents are more likely to have a longer-term effect.
«This will not affect how users now use XRP. There will be no interruptions in work or anything like that", - he said.
One step behind
Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether Ripple has enough development, including these documents, to mitigate criticism. It is worth noting that some were skeptical of this technology from the very beginning, and criticism only grows as XRP gets more attention.
Critics are often supporters of other cryptocurrencies, for example, Bitcoin or ether, in which decentralization is used differently (and some even claimed that the technology is “useless” as an alternative to today's global financial technologies).
Nevertheless, Thomas is not worried about these negative assessments.
In his statements, he positions criticism as divorced from life, noting that a key factor in technology is that it can improve and respond to market demands.
«Critics are always a step behind, - told Thomas CoinDesk. — When I started at Ripple, a lot of things didn't happen. The project was not open source, we did not have validators, but over time it grew, and we were able to implement all this».
According to Thomas, these documents are another way in which Ripple responds to market needs. The company will then work to restrain the centralization of validation, and Thomas assumes that Ripple will be “much more decentralized”Than bitcoin.