Ripple CTO Explains Why XRP Ledger Doesn’t Need Miners or Smart Contracts

David Schwartz, Chief Technical Officer of Ripplewas once again dragged into the public arena to clarify what XRP Ledger actually does – and more importantly, what it does not do.

The discussion began after a $120 million exploit hit the large DeFi Balancer protocol, prompting criticism that most decentralized platforms rely on complex smart contracts and “intermediaries” to keep the system alive. One member of the XRP community called it Ethereum’s “design flaw,” arguing that the 10-year-old XRPL architecture was built precisely to avoid it.

What is the XRP Ledger?

Schwartz just doesn’t agree. In a detailed thread, the Ripple CTO explained that validators in XRPL “do not earn from transactions” and exist only to help nodes agree on a global order of transactions to solve the problem of double spending.

In contrast to Bitcoin and Ethereum, where miners or stakers are paid to include transactions in blocks, XRPL validators provide services to nodes, not account holders, he explains.

So, as it is, each XRP Ledger node already knows which transactions are valid, while validators only decide when each one should appear in the ledger.

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In short, validators do not have intermediates, they synchronize. The structure was intentionally designed in this way to remove the rent-seeking behavior from the network and to ensure that the finality of the transaction depends on mathematics, not incentives or bidding systems that can be played over time.

In other words, XRPL it doesn’t work on cycles of trust or rewards, but on an ordered logic – a design that Ripple still believes separates it from any smart contract-driven chain trying to solve yesterday’s problems.