English

Topology Analysis of the XRP Ledger

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science 2023-01-11 v2 Social and Information Networks

Abstract

XRP Ledger is one of the oldest, well-established blockchains. Despite the popularity of the XRP Ledger, little is known about its underlying peer-to-peer network. The structural properties of a network impact its efficiency, security and robustness. We aim to close the knowledge gap by providing a detailed analysis of the XRP overlay network. In this paper we examine the graph-theoretic properties of the XRP Ledger peer-to-peer network and its temporal characteristics. We crawl the XRP Ledger over two months and collect 1,290 unique network snapshots. We uncover a small group of nodes that act as a networking backbone. In addition, we observe a high network churn, with a third of the nodes changing every five days. Our findings have strong implications for the resilience and safety of the XRP Ledger.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.00869,
  title  = {Topology Analysis of the XRP Ledger},
  author = {Vytautas Tumas and Sean Rivera and Damien Magoni and Radu State},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.00869},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Extended edition, 8 pages. In The 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, March 27 - March 31, 2023, Tallinn, Estonia