Improving the Robustness of the XRP Ledger Network via Edge Augmentation Strategies

Abstract

The XRP Ledger allows its network participants to select a set of trusted peers within the network (i.e., the Unique Node List (UNL)) and communicate with them to reach consensus on which transactions should be included in the next ledger state. However, its consensus protocol requires significant overlap among participants' UNLs, along with a high agreement threshold among the nodes within each UNL (e.g., 80\%). Consequently, an attacker could disrupt the consensus process in such a network by targeting the nodes that form the network's connectivity backbone and reducing the number of trusted participants that can communicate with one another below the required threshold. In this paper, we evaluate strategies to improve the robustness of the XRP Ledger's existing topology, as measured by our formal definitions of quorum and network robustness, and compare them to a second strategy from prior work. The strategy we present is an addition/augmentation approach, in which new edges are added based on different constructions. The second strategy is a rewiring or edge-replacement approach, in which the overall number of edges is preserved but they are rearranged. For each strategy, we consider two different cases: one in which all nodes participate in the edge construction or rewiring process, and another in which only a subset of nodes participates. Our findings demonstrate substantial improvements in robustness when augmentation strategies are used over the default XRP Ledger topology and show that some augmentation strategies achieve robustness metrics equal to or exceeding the rewiring strategy, even when the number of edges added is small (e.g., three edges per node). Additionally, we show that the random K-out-based augmentation strategy maintains higher topological similarity to the original network than rewiring, as measured by Jaccard similarity.