Study Claims Adding Few Nodes to XRPL Can Enhance Resilience

A study on the XRP Ledger claims that adding two to three additional connections between node peers could significantly improve network resilience. In a scenario with a 60% participation rate, each node adding two random connections raised the threshold for the number of validators failing under directed attacks. When the nodes with the highest target degree were removed, the threshold increased from 11% to 38%; in attacks sorted by intermediary centrality, the increase was from 12% to 33%. The study measured the proportion of removed nodes simulated before less than 80% of validators remained in a connected component. It used 1,290 hourly snapshots collected over two months in 2022, selecting a representative graph with 952 nodes and 15,070 edges. The paper also compared the added-link technique with more intrusive reconnection strategies. At participation rates of 80% and 100%, K=3 achieved or exceeded the modeling robustness obtained from about 20 to 25 iterations while preserving more of the original topology. Researchers released the simulation code and snapshot files used in the tests. On August 30, Bithomp's node explorer showed 786 detectable nodes, with 35 validators in the XRP Ledger Foundation's UNL. The material emphasizes that this does not address the current resilience issues of the network, as XRPL's peer crawler may omit the IPs and ports of validators or private peers, and official guidance tends to favor protected paths. Therefore, new research will rely on the latest measurements of topology and the repetition of tests.

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