Ripple CTO Emeritus Unveils Latest Upgrades Behind XRP Innovation

Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz shared a new update on his hub, which has been running for several months since its initial plan was revealed last August.

Schwartz had spun up his XRP Ledger node last year, publishing its output data and researching use cases for XRP. The server hub serves as a production service with maximum uptime and reliability, and data gathered from it is used to understand the XRP Ledger network’s behavior and performance.

In new information shared by the Ripple CTO emeritus on X on April 7, he stated he had to shut down the hub to do some software upgrades, adding that the downtime was under 10 minutes. Schwartz further shared that the hub has had flawless operations over the last two weeks, in a way squashing speculations that the shutdown might have been due to an inefficiency.  

A curious X user asked what he had upgraded on the server hub. The Ripple CTO emeritus answered that it was just software upgrades. He highlighted an XRPL software upgrade to version 3.2.0-b3 as well as various OS and platform updates.

XRP Ledger gets UNL update

According to the XRP Ledger Foundation official X account, an updated XRPL UNL was released. Gen3Labs was added to the UNL, while the University of Sao Paulo was removed at their request.

A unique node list (UNL) is a server’s list of validators that it trusts not to collude. Every XRP Ledger server is configured with an UNL, which determines which validation votes it listens to and which votes it throws out during the consensus process.

In March, Version 3.1.2 of rippled — the reference server implementation of the XRP Ledger protocol — was released. This update contains fixes for security issues that, in the worst case scenario, could cause servers to crash or restart. The version fixes an edge case that can cause outages on public facing nodes.