XRP Can’t Reach Consensus Finds Paper

In particular, the network may fork under the standard condition on UNL overlap stated by Ripple and in the presence of only a very small fraction of malicious nodes,” the author says. In XRP, however, as there is no proper network wide validation of what is being communicated, nor a way to reconcile conflicting information, “the consensus protocol of the Ripple network is brittle and fails to ensure consensus as commonly understood in computer science and among blockchain practitioners,” the authors say.

In addition the authors say all validators use the default UNL provided by Ripple Labs, with there being “good reasons for insisting on such a centralized structure in the Ripple network as would nodes select the trusted validators on their own, consensus might be violated much more easily.” Emin Gün Sirer, the distributed networks professor at Cornell, stated that in this paper “formal analysis shows that the consensus protocol used in Ripple/XRP fails to maintain safety and liveness even when their stated assumptions are maintained.”

Timeline of Xrp