An interesting debate has erupted around the decentralization of XRPL. Justin Bons from Cyber Capital criticized, claiming that the XRP Ledger is controlled by Ripple and does not meet decentralization standards. His main argument focused on the UNL mechanism — he insisted that it gives Ripple excessive influence over the network’s consensus.

David Schwartz, who has long led technical development at Ripple, decided to respond to these accusations. His position is quite clear: decentralization is not what characterizes XRPL. According to him, the network operates through distributed validators, and consensus is achieved without a single corporate authority.

What’s interesting is that Schwartz emphasized a fundamental difference from Bitcoin. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work, while XRPL nodes independently verify each transaction. This is a fundamentally different approach. Additionally, decentralization is a problem that XRPL supposedly solves better than competitors — the network does not reorder transactions to favor miners, as in Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Schwartz also touched on censorship. The architecture of XRPL prevents double-spending and protects against malicious censorship. In his view, this strengthens the truly decentralized nature of the network. Whether these arguments are convincing is up to each individual, but the position is clear: decentralization is an accusation that, as Schwartz believes, simply does not apply to XRPL in the way it is criticized.