The XRP Ledger has operated without a major outage across more than 70 million closed ledgers, but that reliability record may soon be tested in ways its creators never anticipated, one of which may be authoritarian regimes and state-level interference.
How Reorganizing The XRP Ledger Will Affect The NetworkSchwartz also described a possible longer-term change to XRPL’s consensus structure in the event of an attack by an authoritarian regime. His example was a two-layer consensus algorithm, where the inner layer will handle normal network activity, and the outer layer will only come into play when the network needs to change the Unique Node List (UNL) of the inner layer.
The inner validators would keep the XRP Ledger running day to day. If those validators were attacked or compromised, the effect would be minimal, as they will be easily replaced. The outer validators would serve a lighter and less frequent role, stepping in mainly when changes are needed to the validator set.
Targeting the outer validators would also be harder because they would not need to operate constantly in the same visible way. They could be kept lightweight, appear only when needed, and operate through anonymizing services such as Tor or I2P.
