XRP Ledger activates the NegativeUNL amendment on its network

XRP Ledger has activated the NegativeUNL amendment in the system, two weeks after the initial update.

The NegativeUNL amendment is now active on the XRPL. This important amendment provides resilience for the network when multiple validators are offline! ?

— Alloy Networks (@alloynetworks) November 21, 2021

The XRPL Foundation noted it as an important event, stating,

“While we continue to expect high performance levels from validators on our UNL, this provides additional safety when validators are offline for any reason.”

And just to reiterate, the “Negative UNL” is a list of trusted validators that are either offline or malfunctioning. Also, “if a validator’s reliability is less than 50%, it is a candidate to be added to the Negative UNL”.

The foundation had released an update on 9 November that the network “will have a greater tolerance for validator downtime” after the two-week window. With that, the new list consists of 37 validators on the network.

What changes after the update?

The Negative UNL (Unique Node List) is a part of the XRP Ledger consensus protocol. It improves ‘the network’s ability to make forward progress during a partial outage’, improving its “liveness”. It essentially means that even if several validators are offline, servers will adjust its Unique Node List to the ones which are currently online and operational.

Under XRPL’s consensus process, 80% of trusted validators must agree to validate the transaction. Before the update, if seven out of the 34 validators were offline, the transaction couldn’t move forward, taking longer to validate a transaction.

And, the foundation had also explained that validators cannot maintain 100% uptime due to factors like hardware maintenance, software upgrades, internet connectivity problems, targeted attacks, human error, hardware failures, and outside circumstances like natural disasters.

“The Negative UNL is intentionally designed to change at a slow rate, to avoid any time-based disagreements…”

Validators also need to maintain a reliability score of more than 80%, to be removed from the Negative UNL.

Apart from the update, XRP Ledger is also positioning itself in the NFT space. Recently, it announced a $250 million creator fund for XRPL-Focused NFTs.

Monica Long, General Manager of RippleX, commented that the “tokenization trend is very real.” Adding,

“XRP ledger from its inception in 2012 has supported the issuance of tokens onto the ledger. It was kind of the first ledger to do that.”

And to accelerate the use of NFTs on RippleX, the platform proposed new XLS-20 standards for the community’s approval. Long added that after the amendment process, both mintable and mint NFT “are totally committed to integrating with XRP ledger and supporting minting and trading of tokens on the ledger”.