Ripple Comments on Research Indicating That Almost All XRP Transactions Are Empty

Ripple Comments on Research Stating That Vast Majority of XRP Transactions Are Empty

Ripple is responding to a research paper released on Cornell University’s website in March which states that only 2% of all XRP transactions actually led to value transfers, while others were empty.

According to the paper, the vast majority of transactions on the XRP Ledger had zero value — a crypto version of spam.

Now, Ripple is commenting on that, but not by denying it. Rather, chief technology officer David Schwartz states that the report is true, and such activity just signals the ledger’s speed, affordability and capacity.

Schwarts, a longtime member of San Francisco-based startup and pioneer of the XRP Ledger, was asked on Twitter about the “empty” XRP transactions.

“I believe it. Transactions are so fast and cheap and the ledger has so much capacity, little incentive not to submit near zero value txns. Not long ago, 50% off all public decentralized ledger txns were on XRPL!”

Schwartz notes that most of the transactions seem to be bots fighting over positions in the order books, with very few of them appearing malicious.

The CTO also states that taking steps to eradicate the spammers could come at a serious cost to everyday XRP traders.

“Some of the transaction spam can be addressed by fixing “quirks” those transactions exploit. But most of it is just that the ledger is so cheap to use. Raising the price will discourage the spam but also discourage valuable transactions. A decentralized, public system that was designed from the ground up to make censorship as difficult as possible will always have this problem unless transactions are expensive. What are you willing to give up to resolve a problem that is not doing all that much harm?”

The Cornell-published research, conducted by a software engineer and PhD student at Imperial College London, also revealed the spam dominating the network traffic on EOS and Tezos.

“95% of the transactions on EOS were triggered by the airdrop of a currently valueless token; on Tezos, 82% of throughput was used for maintaining consensus.”