Ripple CTO Explains Why XRP Ledger Doesn’t Need Miners or Smart Contracts
David Schwartz, Ripple’s Chief Technical Officer, recently stepped back into the spotlight to clarify the actual functions of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) — and, more importantly, to dispel common misconceptions about what it does not do.
The discussion was sparked by a $120 million exploit targeting the major DeFi protocol Balancer. This incident revived criticisms that many decentralized platforms depend heavily on complex smart contracts and “middlemen” to maintain system integrity. One member of the XRP community labeled this issue as Ethereum’s “design flaw,” highlighting that the XRPL’s architecture, which is over a decade old, was purpose-built to avoid such vulnerabilities.
So, who owns the XRP Ledger?
In response, Schwartz provided a detailed explanation. He emphasized that validators on the XRPL “don’t earn from transactions” and exist solely to help nodes reach consensus on a single global order of transactions — effectively solving the double-spend problem. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, where miners or stakers receive payments to include transactions in blocks, XRPL validators serve the nodes rather than account holders.
Every XRPL node already knows which transactions are valid. Validators’ role is simply to determine the exact sequence in which these transactions appear on the ledger. In essence, validators do not act as intermediaries; instead, they synchronize the network.
This design was intentionally created to eliminate rent-seeking behaviors from the network. It ensures that transaction finality is governed by mathematical certainty, not by incentives or bidding systems that can be exploited over time.
Put simply, the XRPL operates not on trust or reward loops, but on ordered logic. Ripple believes this foundational approach continues to distinguish XRPL from other smart-contract-driven chains attempting to address issues from previous blockchain designs.
https://bitcoinethereumnews.com/tech/ripple-cto-explains-why-xrp-ledger-doesnt-need-miners-or-smart-contracts/
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