Odaily News The XRP Ledger was suspended for more than an hour late Tuesday, sparking a heated debate between critics and supporters of the network. Ripple CTO David Schwartz confirmed that XRPL was back up and running with no loss of user funds, but the cause of the problem was still under investigation. Some have argued that a network outage of more than an hour represents a failure of consensus, exposing the network to a critical coordination attack vector, and have criticized the apparent centralization among a relatively small number of trusted validators. In response, Daniel Keller, CTO of blockchain infrastructure company Eminence, said the suspension was "as planned" to ensure the integrity of the ledger. "Every solution has trade-offs. Pausing until a solution is found is one of them."
The XRP Ledger network has a total of more than 200 validators. But the number of validators on the unique node list (UNL) trusted by each node, which participates in the consensus process, is much smaller. The XRPL Foundation recommends a unique node list (UNL) of at least 35 validators. In comparison, although not directly comparable, there are more than 1 million active validators on Ethereum, and Bitcoin's network has at least 65,000 nodes and thousands of miners worldwide. (TheBlock)