Ripple CTO emeritus David Schwartz this week sketched out how the XRP Ledger could fight back against state-level attacks, describing a potential two-layer consensus system that would make it much harder for a hostile government to take down the network. The idea, which Schwartz shared in response to a social media question about whether an authoritarian regime like Putin's could co-opt or disrupt the XRPL's validator set, is still conceptual — but it reveals how the XRP community is already thinking about worst-case scenarios.
The Two-Layer Plan
Schwartz described a system with two consensus layers. An inner layer would handle the bulk of everyday network activity — payments, transactions, the usual. That layer stays lean and fast. Then there's an outer layer that only kicks in when changes to the Unique Node List (UNL) — the set of trusted validators — are needed. Those outer validators would be lightweight, run less often, and could hide behind anonymizing services like Tor or I2P. The idea: make them hard to find, and even harder to pressure or shut down.
The Real Threat
Schwartz was blunt about the risk. State-level actors could definitely cause temporary disruptions on blockchains like XRPL, he said. But long-term control is a different story — especially if the community stays active and distributed. The attack only becomes truly dangerous, Schwartz argued, if a hostile actor can scare people into not running validators at all. That's the real nightmare scenario: not a technical takedown, but a climate of fear that chills participation.
Ripple's Limited Role
One key fact Schwartz pointed to: Ripple-run validators account for less than 20% of the total XRPL network. So even if someone hit Ripple's infrastructure directly, the validator set itself would be mostly intact. The XRPL doesn't depend on Ripple to keep running.
Track Record
The ledger has already proved resilient. Schwartz noted that the XRPL has gone more than 70 million closed ledgers without a major outage. The inner validators that keep the system humming day-to-day are easy to replace if one gets compromised. The discussion came from a social media post asking about Putin's regime specifically — but the design Schwartz outlined would apply against any state actor willing to play rough. No timeline for implementation was given, but the fact that the network's top technical mind is already workshopping this kind of defense suggests the XRP community isn't waiting for an attack to start preparing.
