A slowdown in transaction processing on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) network has led to broader checks of the protocol’s overall structure.

On Oct. 21, blockchain outlet U.Today reported that David Schwartz (데이비드 슈워츠), a former Ripple chief technology officer and co-developer of XRPL, disclosed the network’s actual weak points in the wake of the delays.

The issue began when the XRPL operations team detected an anomaly in which ledger close times slowed significantly from normal levels. As engineers traced the cause of the delays, concerns grew in the community about the reliability of decentralised systems. A key question was whether the entire network could stop if some core hubs become overloaded.

Schwartz said XRPL software is protected by a multi-layer security system. He said there are two situations in which the entire network could be paralysed.

One is a large-scale infrastructure collapse in which validator servers around the world fail simultaneously. He said a disruption of that scale would effectively require circumstances comparable to a global natural disaster. The other is a failure of the consensus algorithm that handles agreement between nodes, or a code error that causes problems in core protocol functions.

The slowdown was interpreted as a direct signal that the system’s technical safety margin had shrunk. Schwartz said it could indicate an attack targeting the XRPL network or that a hidden bug inside the code had been activated.

He dismissed concerns about a single point of failure. He said XRPL operations would not be affected even if one hub, including his own node, stopped or became overloaded. The network is fully decentralised, he said, so a failure of a single node does not lead to a total outage.

The practical issue was that the monitoring system was shaken. As consensus rounds slowed, validators switched to a maximum-load state, and internal monitoring systems also failed to record diagnostic data.

Schwartz said he had to reboot servers without identifying the exact cause. Later discussions also showed that his hub had been sending logs to an old test host of the XRP Ledger Foundation (XRPLF). With operational inertia or configuration issues also overlapping, weaknesses in the diagnostic system were exposed.

Engineers and community operators are now manually analysing remaining logs to find and fix defects. Schwartz acknowledged that safety margins had temporarily narrowed but said the situation was not one to be overly anxious about. He said the development team is controlling the situation and that the current code structure still has sufficient capacity to keep the network operating.

The incident shows that a bigger challenge than XRPL’s decentralised structure itself is how to secure diagnostic data and operational visibility under high-load conditions. Follow-up investigations are expected to focus not only on the direct cause of processing delays, but also on how reliably log collection and monitoring can be maintained when validators are overloaded.

"I think my hub was working fine during the incident but it's hard to tell because the incident affected its monitoring. But the XRPL itself isn't affected by outages of my hub or any other hub. There are really only two threats to the stability of the network as a whole. One is a large number of servers failing at the same time. A natural disaster could do this, but otherwise it's not very likely. The other is a network-level failure of the consensus process or some other criticial network-level function. The software has multiple levels of safeties and independent protections to ensure that it has massive safety margins. But whenever we see any evidence that some problem has reduced those safety margins, we try to track it down and fix it. Slow consensus rounds is evidence of some reduction in safety margins for some reason. It could be an attack or bug. But unless you see key developers starting to panic, there's likely massive amounts of safety margin left."