David Schwartz, Ripple’s chief technology officer, has emphasized a crucial security and trust distinction between assets native to a blockchain and assets bridged across different blockchains.
In a recent social media post, he has made it clear that native assets are fully secured by their own network, meaning that no external system can "steal" XRP because there’s no copy elsewhere that can be compromised.
"You can't steal XRP from XRPL because there is no place other than XRPL that XRP can be," Schwartz explained.
If a problem arises with XRP itself (for instance, a bug or issue), the governance of the XRP Ledger can fix it.
He cites Bitcoin in 2013 as an example of a network fixing issues with its own native asset.
External risks
However, when one moves an asset like ETH onto XRPL via a bridge, that ETH still exists natively on Ethereum.
If the bridge is exploited or ETH is stolen on Ethereum, Ethereum’s governance won’t intervene since nothing is broken because the asset still exists on Ethereum. In such a case, recovery isn’t guaranteed.
Even if governance is decentralized, there’s always a point where assets could be potentially stolen outside the native network.
Hence, cross-chain interactions introduce a fundamentally different level of risk (even if governance is well-structured).
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team