David Schwartz, chief technology officer at Ripple, has praised Xaman, a popular XRP wallet, for swiftly reacting to a large-scale supply chain attack on the Node Package Manager (NPM) ecosystem. 

A reputable developer’s NPM account was recently compromised, and widely JavaScript packages ended up being infected with malicious code. 

The malware specifically targets cryptocurrency wallets such as MetaMask in order to redirect the funds of uninitiated crypto users to the attackers by secretly swapping addresses. 

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As reported by U.Today, Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet has urged crypto users who do not have hardware wallets with clear signing to temporarily stop conducting on-chain transactions. 

Xaman’s reaction 

The team behind the Xaman wallet immediately conducted an audit, which showed that it was safe for users. 

XRPL Labs co-founder Wietse Wind Supply has noted that chain attacks are becoming “more and more common.”

The XRP community has been paying close attention to Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, as he continues to share details about his latest project. Based on a recent post on X, Schwartz signaled a development that could soon move beyond testing and into production. To accompany his update, he shared performance charts that provide a glimpse into how the system has been running in the past few days.

Ripple CTO Prepares XRPL Hub For Production

David Schwartz revealed on the social media platform X that the XRPL Hub server he has been testing is close to being ready for production. Schwartz explained that the past three days of performance have been encouraging, and stability levels are now high enough for the hub to be considered for wider rollout next week. 

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 Schwartz had previously revealed his plans to create a high-performance hub that sets aside special connection slots for UNL validators, important nodes, and servers that run XRPL-based applications. The hub is designed to strengthen XRPL’s connectivity by improving reliability for peers and validators, while also providing developers with a consistent gateway into the network.

In his update, Schwartz noted that the server has been stable since its restart five days ago. According to the metrics he shared, the hub has been maintaining a peer count that has steadily increased from around 300 connections earlier in the week to over 357 peers at the most recent check. This consistency indicates that the server is successfully handling traffic across the XRPL ecosystem.

What’s Next For The Hub?

Schwartz noted that the system had shown strong performance over the last three days, enough for him to consider transitioning it into production as early as next week. However, the monitoring data showed occasional latency spikes, which Schwartz linked to higher outbound bandwidth usage. These spikes did not occur every time bandwidth rose, and this makes the pattern somewhat puzzling but not alarming. 

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On the other hand, latency stayed well below levels that would impact real-world performance, with the 10% latency line never exceeding 33 milliseconds since the restart. The broader latency averages are comfortably within acceptable ranges. 

Even at peaks, the bandwidth usage is within safe capacity. Peer disconnections, which saw spikes earlier in the week, have since normalized to an average around 17 per interval. Together, these metrics underline that the system is stable and capable of supporting a wider role within the XRPL ecosystem as Schwartz prepares for the next stage.

Reactions to Schwartz’s update on X show that the XRPL community is closely tracking the hub’s development, and many XRP enthusiasts have welcomed the prospect of a production-ready rollout. If all goes well, Schwartz should be able to give a definitive update regarding production next week. Schwartz had clarified that this hub is a personal project he has been building independently, separate from his work as CTO at Ripple.

Featured image from Getty Images, chart from Tradingview.com

A few weeks ago, Ripple CTO David Schwartz revealed plans to launch a hub that will be used to understand XRP network behavior and performance based on data gathered from it.

Now that the hub is in operation, Schwartz observed his first “bit of weird data” from the hub as reported yesterday by U.Today. The Ripple CTO revealed corrective measures for the anomaly, which have achieved results.

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According to the Ripple CTO, the past 24 hours of the hub’s performance looked solid, although a tiny glitch was recorded at 12:58 a.m., which might be due to the monitoring system.

At the time of Schwartz’s X post, the hub was handling 11,000 requests per second from 173 peers with a response time of about 0.006 seconds from the average request coming in to the reply going out.

Schwartz shared an image alongside his post that illustrated this. The X post caught the attention of the XRP community with XRP enthusiast WrathofKahneman inquiring about what the “abuse” category in the  “disconnections” side of the image meant.

Schwartz stated that this referred to servers that had been disconnected from the hub due to the belief that they were placing excessive load on it. He suspects that 100% of these are false positives due to some defects in the XRPL code, and that working on this is one of the reasons he chose to run the hub.

Exciting network possibility for XRPL

Schwartz revisited one of his concepts for XRP Ledger, which he designed eight years ago: the peer link policing system aimed to protect users against malicious peers. While the design, cryptography and rules of XRPL effectively safeguard against malicious peers misleading users, it could impose load on them.

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To handle this, a peer receives “charge” for messages it sends, and “credits” are also given over time. If a peer’s “charges” exceed their “credits,” they risk being disconnected.

Schwartz stated that the schedule of fees and credits he picked almost a decade ago worked, but because the network has grown much since then and the hardware has changed, he may need to revisit it.

Going forward, Schwartz noted he wants to further understand how well the charge/credit scheme is working on the live network and, if needed, make some adjustments to it. One possibility is to take latency into account, granting peers with low latency a higher credit limit, given that an attacker cannot forge low latency.

Ripple chief technology officer (CTO) David “JoelKatz” Schwartz used a late-Wednesday post on X to frame a surge of payments and stablecoin companies launching their own base-layer networks as validation of blockchain’s role in finance—and to restate how the XRP Ledger’s design differs from the new entrants.

“We’ve been seeing more and more players in the payments and stablecoins space launch their own blockchains. To me, that’s a clear sign the market sees blockchain as core financial infrastructure — something we’ve believed in and have been building toward on the XRP Ledger for over 13 years,” he wrote, adding, “Launching a blockchain is hard. Building an ecosystem with developers, liquidity, trust, and real-world usage is even harder.”

Competition For Ripple And The XRP Ledger?

Schwartz situated XRPL’s posture in the long-running debate over network governance. “Some blockchains are built with permissioned validator sets controlled by one entity or a small group. This can provide control and compliance for specific, closed-network scenarios, but it limits reach, resilience, and the ability for anyone to contribute to securing and growing the network,” he wrote.

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“As many of you know, the XRPL is public and permissionless at its core, with optional permissioned features for regulated use cases.” He argued that the ledger’s open base “makes it adaptable, interoperable, and well-positioned to serve as critical infrastructure for the world’s financial system — connecting assets, markets, and participants seamlessly across borders.”

The remarks arrive as two US fintech heavyweights move into L1 territory. Circle this week unveiled Arc, an EVM-compatible Layer-1 it says is “purpose-built for stablecoin finance,” with dollar-denominated fees (USDC as native gas), opt-in privacy, a built-in RFQ-style FX engine, and “deterministic sub-second settlement finality” via the Malachite consensus engine. Circle says Arc will enter private testnet in the coming weeks, target public testnet in the fall, and a mainnet beta in 2026.

Separately, Stripe is developing Tempo, a high-performance, payments-focused L1 being built in partnership with crypto VC firm Paradigm. Tempo is designed to run code compatible with Ethereum, is currently in stealth with a small team, and it remains unclear whether it will have a native token.

Schwartz also highlighted specific XRPL design choices he sees as aligned with financial-grade settlement. “It’s encouraging to see some newer chains adopt design choices that have long been part of the XRPL’s architecture, like deterministic finality … It shows there’s growing alignment in the industry on the importance of predictable, reliable settlement for financial applications without expensive validation,” he wrote.

He reiterated that XRPL fees are meant to stay “low and predictable, just fractions of a cent, without a separate gas token,” noting that “every transaction on the XRPL uses/burns XRP.” XRPL’s technical documentation specifies that each transaction destroys a small amount of XRP as an anti-spam fee, and describes consensus rules aimed at deterministic ordering and finality.

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Where Schwartz drew a line was on governance flexibility. He acknowledged that permissioned validator sets can make sense for “specific, closed-network scenarios,” but underscored XRPL’s approach: a public, permissionless core with opt-in controls for compliance needs.

The ledger’s native features include Authorized Trust Lines, Deposit Authorization/Preauthorization, and issuer-level freeze tooling for issued assets—not for XRP itself—allowing regulated token issuers to gate or police flows without converting the entire network into a walled garden. XRPL’s own FAQ emphasizes that it is a decentralized, public blockchain where changes require supermajority validator approval.

The strategic contrast with the new fintech chains is already visible. Arc explicitly centers USDC—making fees dollar-denominated and embedding Circle’s payments stack—whereas XRPL retains XRP for fees and settlement while supporting issued assets through trust-line mechanics. If Tempo proceeds as reported, Stripe would be pursuing an Ethereum-compatible L1 optimized for predictable payments performance, potentially mirroring Arc’s enterprise-centric pitch but with a broader merchant-services integration surface.

Schwartz closed on a deliberately expansive note about the competitive set: “Looking forward to the next phase of XRPL innovations, bringing more programmability, compliance-grade capabilities, and deeper liquidity for institutional use,” he wrote—before welcoming rivals: “And to those just getting started… Welcome to the party! The crypto tent is only getting bigger.”

At press time, XRP traded at $3.23.

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Ripple CTO David Schwartz has joined a heated debate after Custodia Bank CEO Caitlin Long criticized Ripple, the XRP Ledger (XRPL), and its stablecoin RLUSD in a podcast clip shared on X. Long questioned XRP’s decentralization, likened Ripple’s early funding to an ICO, and argued the blockchain had fallen short of its adoption goals among banks and other institutions. Her remarks drew quick pushback from XRP community member Vet, who disputed her claims, prompting Schwartz to invite Long to a direct, fact-based discussion.

Caitlin Long Criticizes Ripple And XRP

Caitlin Long, CEO of Custodia Bank, did not hold back in her view of Ripple and XRP in a recent episode of the Gold Goats ‘n Guns podcast. In her remarks in the podcast, Long noted that Ripple’s early funding model, which she described as the first of the ICOs, has permanently hindered institutional trust in XRP. She said Ripple had been active longer than most blockchain projects but had not made significant progress in replacing traditional banking systems like SWIFT. 

According to her, the company’s move to issue RLUSD through its own regulated financial entities is a notable pivot away from relying solely on the XRPL as a global settlement layer. Although she acknowledged that US regulatory pressure under the Biden administration had affected Ripple’s operations, she maintained that the base layer network was unlikely to become the backbone of international payments.

With this in mind, Long predicted that when the US Treasury eventually decides on a blockchain for tokenizing T-bills, it will most likely choose Ethereum over Ripple due to the former’s maturity and better adoption.

XRP Community And CTO Fire Back

Her comments prompted a detailed rebuttal from prominent XRP community member Vet, who dismissed Long’s claims as misinformed. As noted by Vet, Ripple never conducted an ICO, XRP was worthless when it was created, and all 100 billion tokens were created in a genesis account. Vet also defended the XRPL’s decentralization, pointing to over 1,000 nodes and more than 100 independent validators run by individuals and businesses worldwide. 

He noted that Ethereum, on the other hand, was launched via an ICO. In addition, Vet highlighted Ripple’s continued integration of the XRPL in its payment products and the fact that RLUSD is issued on the ledger. He cited growing business use cases, ongoing technical amendments, and the XRPL’s historic role as the first blockchain with a native decentralized exchange and tokenization capabilities.

Following Vet’s response, David Schwartz also took to X to directly address Caitlin Long’s claims. Although he noted that the community member had already provided “some basic ones” to start the factual discussion, the Ripple CTO invited Long to an open conversation about Ripple, RLUSD, the XRPL, and XRP. 

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A couple of days after surprising the XRP community with the news that he had built and deployed a fully operational XRPL server out of his own pocket, Ripple CTO David Schwartz is already thinking about what comes next — and no, it is not more hardware. This time, it is about visibility.

Back in early August, Schwartz said he is planning to write a custom monitoring tool to track the performance and activity of his setup. This is specifically to support tools like rrdtool or Cacti.

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It might sound like a side project, but it is actually based on the same ideas that went into the hardware build: keep it simple, strong and built specifically for XRPL. The server, which is in a New York datacenter and runs Ubuntu with a 9950X processor, 256 GB RAM and a 10 Gbps unmetered link, is already syncing and providing live connectivity. 

Schwartz confirmed it can realistically handle 192 server connections and possibly more but wants to keep plenty of headroom in reserve for moments of network stress or instability.

What’s next?

There are not any monitoring graphs yet, but that is what the next step is for. Actually, while one of his followers suggested using Grafana, Schwartz just dismissed it, saying that it is not necessary for what he is building. 

It is not about fancy dashboards — it is about understanding how the infrastructure performs under pressure and making sure it stays reliable, even in unpredictable situations.

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The project is still personal and independent, with no official Ripple involvement, but the implications for XRPL’s decentralization are real. With Schwartz back in the trenches running infrastructure directly, the network might gain not only more connectivity but also sharper insights into how it performs outside the lab.

This week, a casual IPO poll from Ripple CTO David Schwartz took an unexpected turn when one user seized the opportunity to renew a familiar accusation: that Kraken’s cofounder, Jesse Powell, has long held a negative view of Ripple and XRP. Schwartz was not having it. In his opinion, Powell’s stance has always been more nuanced.

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This comment prompted closer scrutiny of Powell’s XRP history, revealing that the relationship is far from straightforward. Powell has been vocal about the legal ambiguity surrounding XRP for years, often pointing out how its early ties to Ripple Labs (then OpenCoin) could create complications for regulators. 

However, his tone has not been one of disdain but rather one of caution layered with technical nuance.

In one notable thread, he argued that if XRP were found to be a security, exchanges such as Kraken could be held liable, even if they operated in good faith. He described this as an “asymmetrical risk” that made listing decisions difficult. 

Later, when Kraken suspended XRP trading for U.S. customers, Powell made it clear that it was a business decision, not a personal one, describing the legal uncertainty as “too risky from a business perspective.”

Kraken aims for $15 billion IPO

Now, that debate is resurfacing just as Kraken reenters IPO territory. The company is reportedly raising $100 million ahead of a potential public listing, aiming for a valuation of over $15 billion. The funding round is expected to close by the end of the year and, if successful, would revive IPO plans that were shelved after Coinbase’s turbulent debut.

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Kraken remains one of the world’s most active exchanges, posting over $1.37 billion in daily trading volume and supporting more than 1,100 trading pairs.

Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, has revealed that regulatory risks are the main reason why the company and its partners have not embraced the XRP Ledger’s decentralized exchange (DEX) for payment settlements.

The statement came in response to a user on X (formerly Twitter) who questioned the DEX’s underwhelming activity despite Ripple’s wide-ranging institutional partnerships.

According to the community, the network has over a decade of development behind it and more than 300 financial partners. As a result, it is expected to facilitate far greater on-chain volume than it is currently processing.

Why is Ripple not using XRPL DEX for payments?

In his post on X, Schwartz acknowledged the slow progress, attributing it to institutional reluctance around public liquidity pools. He said:

“Institutions have historically preferred to use digital assets off-chain rather than on-chain. I think we’re close to changing that because institutions are starting to see the benefits of moving on-chain.”

Schwartz also pointed out a key concern in the difficulty of verifying liquidity sources on an open DEX. In his words, Ripple currently avoids using the XRPL because “we can’t be sure a terrorist won’t provide the liquidity for payment.”

Considering this, Ripple or its counterpart engaging with the DEX poses serious legal and reputational risks without reliable controls.

To address these concerns, Schwartz highlighted ongoing efforts to introduce permissioned features. One such tool under development, permissioned domains, could help institutions identify trustworthy liquidity providers, potentially unlocking safer use of on-chain payment rails.

BlackRock could still adopt XRPL

Despite the issues Schwartz cited, the Ripple CTO expressed a belief that traditional financial institutional players like BlackRock might find it more efficient to build on existing networks like XRPL, rather than create standalone blockchains from scratch.

He cited Circle’s USDC strategy as a prime example of this trend. Instead of launching its own blockchain, Circle deployed its stablecoin across multiple public networks to leverage scale, interoperability, and existing liquidity.

According to Schwartz, these traits position XRPL as a strong candidate for future enterprise-grade tokenization projects. He argued that public chains offer the kind of asset mobility and infrastructure depth that private solutions struggle to match.

BlackRock has already entered the space through Ethereum. Its tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, has amassed over $2.4 billion in assets, making it the largest of its kind.

Schwartz suggested that this precedent may hint at how future institutions could use XRPL in similar ways, provided compliance features catch up.

Mentioned in this article

Ripple’s chief technology officer David Schwartz confessed that he once faked fan questions for Black Sabbath and filtered the responses of recently deceased rock legend Ozzy Osbourne during what was meant to be an authentic Q&A with fans — an experience he now regrets.

“I cheated,” Swartz said in an X post on Thursday.

“To me personally, it was a failure, but to everyone else it was a success,” recalling his time at WebMaster when, as an employee, he was assigned to type out responses to fan questions for Osbourne — who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 76 — and the other members of Black Sabbath using the company’s ConferenceRoom software. 

Fans didn’t have interest in anyone but Osbourne

As a self-proclaimed fast typist, Schwartz explained that he was asked to speak with the band members over the phone, relay fan questions, and type out their responses in real time.

But it quickly became clear to Schwartz that fans had no interest in anyone else in the band; every question was for Osbourne. “I specifically asked the moderators to give me questions that weren’t for Ozzy. There just weren’t any,” he said.

Schwartz had a set of pre-written questions on hand in case of technical issues, which he ended up using to avoid leaving the other band members out.

“I passed a canned question to each of the other band members in rotation. And I mixed what I could make out of what they said with the canned answer from their manager,” Schwartz said.

“At the time, I felt really bad about the whole thing. It wasn’t the authentic interaction with celebrities that I wanted it to be and that I tried to make it,” he said, adding that only “two or three” legitimate fan questions ever made it to the band.

Schwartz reveals he cleaned up Osbourne’s answers

Schwartz also admitted that he removed the profanity from Osbourne’s answers:

“Ozzy’s answer featured the C-word a lot. The bad C-word. The one that Americans really don’t like to say. It was pretty close to the only word I could hear clearly.”

“I typed up Ozzy’s answer as closely as I could, probably getting it way off due to the poor connection quality. I censored the C-words,” he added.

Related: XRP dump: Ripple co-founder under fire for moving $175M XRP near highs

Meanwhile, Cointelegraph reported on Friday that memecoins inspired by Osbourne skyrocketed as tributes flooded over the icon’s death this week. 

One known as The Mad Man (OZZY) pumped over 16,800% to trade at $0.003851 and hit a market cap of $3.85 million.

Magazine: Robinhood’s tokenized stocks have stirred up a legal hornet’s nest

]]> https://earlybirdsinvest.com/ripple-cto-regrets-the-time-he-censored-ozzy-osbourne/feed/ 0 49715 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/lightning-labs-cto-security-scare-is-user-error-not-a-software-flaw/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/lightning-labs-cto-security-scare-is-user-error-not-a-software-flaw/#respond Sun, 23 Feb 2025 04:49:10 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/lightning-labs-cto-security-scare-is-user-error-not-a-software-flaw/

A recent security issue in the Lightning Network has raised concerns, but Lightning Labs’ Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Olaoluwa Osuntokun has suggested the problem is not with the software itself.

Instead, according to Osuntokum’s post on X, he pointed to a compromised user device as the likely cause.

The Lightning Network, a layer-2 solution designed to make Bitcoin
BTC


$96,420.21

transactions faster and cheaper, currently holds about 5,145 BTC, valued at approximately $500 million.

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In a February 19 post on X, Satoshi Labs co-founder Pavol Rusnak issued a warning about vulnerabilities in older versions of Lightning Network Daemon (LND) and Lightning Terminal.

He urged users to update immediately, stating that attackers exploited flaws patched in newer releases. His message specifically mentioned LND versions older than 0.18.5 and Lightning Terminal versions before 0.14.1.

Osuntokun responded, stating that the issue did not appear to be a direct flaw in LND. He explained that the affected user’s machine had been compromised, which may have allowed attackers to gain access to their funds.

This warning comes after another security issue was flagged on GitHub on February 13. A report highlighted a weakness in the ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) used for Bitcoin transactions. The concern was that a flaw in the elliptic library, a JavaScript package used in cryptography, could expose private keys if numbers used once or “nonces” were reused.

Meanwhile, Microsoft recently issued a warning about an updated XCSSET malware. What kind of damage could it cause? Read the full story.

Having completed a Master’s degree in Economics, Politics, and Cultures of the East Asia region, Aaron has written scientific papers analyzing the differences between Western and Collective forms of capitalism in the post-World War II era.
With close to a decade of experience in the FinTech industry, Aaron understands all of the biggest issues and struggles that crypto enthusiasts face. He’s a passionate analyst who is concerned with data-driven and fact-based content, as well as that which speaks to both Web3 natives and industry newcomers.
Aaron is the go-to person for everything and anything related to digital currencies. With a huge passion for blockchain & Web3 education, Aaron strives to transform the space as we know it, and make it more approachable to complete beginners.
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