Ripple Chief Technology Officer (CTO) David Schwartz has provided an update on his next project for the XRP Ledger (XRPL). He stated that it is almost production-ready and explained what it entails.
In an X post, the Ripple CTO said that the next project, which relates to an upgrade on the XRPL, is going well. He noted that there has been one spike in latency that only affected a few links that were already poor. Schwartz added that the tiny drop in network bandwidth appears to be a monitoring dropout and doesn’t show on the switch port’s monitoring. In line with this, he opined that they are nearly production ready.
When asked on what exactly the project was about, the Ripple CTO explained that he is running a hub server that will soon help keep important XRPL nodes slightly more reliably connected to each other. He added that he hasn’t run any production infrastructure in a while, which makes this current project exciting.
Earlier on, Schwartz had mentioned why he was looking to run this XRPL infrastructure. The Ripple CTO remarked that, looking at the network, the most useful thing would be a high-quality hub with reserved slots for UNL validators, other hubs, and servers serving applications on the XRPL. He noted that this is a personal project from him and not Ripple.
Based on the plan he shared, the Ripple CTO deployed a server using an AMD 9950X CPU, 256GB of RAM, a 2TB boot SATA SSD, 2x2TB NVME SSDs (s/w RAID 0) for NuDB, and a 10GB (unmetered) link. The server will run Ubunutu LTE and be in a datacenter in NYC. Schwartz further said that it would be a single server run as a production service, aiming for maximum uptime and reliability.
He warned that nobody should rely on it because an important XRPL server should never rely on a single hub. The Ripple CTO plans also to gather data from the server to understand network behavior and performance. However, he noted that there will be no disruptive testing unless there are unusual circumstances that make it necessary.
Meanwhile, although the hub server is mainly for important XRPL nodes, the Ripple CTO had mentioned that the rest of the slots would be available to the public on a best-effort and space-available basis. He noted that only reserved slots would be restricted to important nodes.
Besides the Ripple CTO’s project, XRPL validator Vet also revealed that there is a Concentrated Liquidity proposal for the Automated Market Maker (AMM), which is in the pipeline. He explained that this is a way to make the AMM more advanced and especially capital efficient. This will further enable liquidity providers to specify provision ranges.