Ex-Ripple CTO Provides Major Update on His XRP Experiment

David Schwartz, Ripple’s former CTO and current XRP Ledger architect, has officially shut down his personal XRPL hub for a long-anticipated upgrade to version 3.0, sharing a month’s worth of network performance data before the reboot.

The stats reveal how the experimental node — likely serving as a peer discovery or routing point — handled traffic across the network. 

This coincides with the official release of XRP Ledger version 3.0.0, one of the most substantial upgrades in recent memory. This update includes critical amendments, such as fixes for escrow accounting errors, AMM rounding bugs and metadata omissions in MPT payments.

It also adds new simulation metadata fields, introduces the STInt32 type and enforces stricter API request validation. From a DevOps perspective, the update delivers essential CI refactors, increased code coverage, modularization efforts and new test infrastructure using doctest.

More numbers

According to Schwartz, the system clocked consistent inbound and outbound bandwidth around 100-200 Mbps, spiking up to 219 Mbps outbound and 138 Mbps inbound during heavy loads.

Latency remained mostly stable, although high-percentile latency moments hit as much as 1,270 milliseconds, possibly reflecting peer issues or routing inefficiencies.

Peer disconnections averaged 17.4 every five minutes; still, abuse-related disconnections remained negligible — only 0.2 on average — indicating the node faced little targeted disruption. Meanwhile, the total peer count gradually rebounded from a December dip, stabilizing near 386 by the time of the shutdown.

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The shutdown appears to be methodical. Schwartz's hub had been a staple in XRPL's ecosystem for a long while, and the upgrade shows how the Ripple CTO emeritus is serious about keeping his infrastructure on top.

Should XRPL continue growing its validator and relay ecosystem in 2026, Schwartz’s Hub v3.0 could play a pivotal role in anchoring next-generation throughput, reducing latency and supporting increasingly global, enterprise-grade transaction routing.