Ripple decided to update the basic XRP technology

The startup Ripple, which stands behind one of the top cryptocurrencies, decided to update the underlying technology that underlies its product.

Ripple is going to release two new official peer review papers – one describing the XRP consensus algorithm in a more formal way, and the other describing a way to improve the diverse connections of each node.

This demonstrates the readiness of Ripple, whose investors include such banks as Santander and SBI, to invest in the underlying infrastructure that supports its cryptocurrency.

Although XRP has become one of the most sought after cryptocurrencies, in some ways its development lags behind other more successful projects such as bitcoin and Ethereum.

Therefore, it is not surprising that CTO Ripple Stefan Thomas speaks about this event as one that is designed to contribute to the development of closer relations between the research Department of the company and the scientific community. In short, the startup wants scientists to be able to work with Ripple technology more easily:

This is the first time we produce peer-reviewed materials. Obviously, this opens the door for future research. This is only the first step in our cooperation with the scientific community.

More broadly, these documents can be seen as the first attempt in quite some time to update and improve the platform’s documentation. Previous work of this kind was released in 2014.

Defense game

These two documents have one Central theme: security.

What we’re trying to do is add some protection against some unlikely attack scenarios. Mainly in order to avoid manipulation of the entire network as a whole.

The key word here is”unlikely.” Thomas argues that these attacks are impossible, unless the attacker is, for example, the US government, which has enough technological and financial resources to completely destroy the network. Although such a scenario remains unlikely, the startup is still trying to protect itself from these cases.

We are extremely careful, we need the best security.

The first document, entitled “Analysis of the XRP Protocol, Consensus Ledger”, is based on document 2014 and comes down to two things: “security”, the main threat to which it is possible to fork and the subsequent separation of the network and “viability”, which consists in the fact that the network under all conditions will continue processing the transaction.

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The second document, “Cobalt: BFT open network management”, aims to improve previous XRP plans with an algorithm that supports a richer array of validators.

You can think of XRP as a voting system, where each node that stores the transaction history of Ripple, has the right to vote. To achieve this, each node in the Ripple network contains something that can be called a unique list of nodes (UNL), a list of nodes in the Ripple network that this node considers legitimate.

Both articles are largely related to distributed systems, a field of research in computer science that describes how large networks function. And since they are more theoretical, Thomas stressed that these documents are likely to have a longer-term effect.

This will not affect how users are now using XRP. No downtime or anything like that will happen.