The Ripple-affiliated XRP Ledger or XRPL has achieved a remarkable milestone, catapulting its throughput from a modest 80 XRP payment transactions per second [TPS] to an astounding 3400 sustained transactions per second. This incredible surge represents an extraordinary improvement of over 4000%. This breakthrough was initially observed on the blockchain firm’s website and swiftly garnered attention in the cryptocurrency community.
For those unfamiliar with the term, transactions per second, or TPS, is a metric that measures the number of transactions processed by a blockchain network in a single second. A blockchain network’s TPS depends on various factors, including its consensus algorithm, block size, network latency, and transaction complexity.
Despite the skepticism expressed by numerous experts regarding the sudden surge in XRPL’s throughput, the Ripple engineering team previously shed light on this achievement in a blog post back in July. In their release, the company explained that this accomplishment resulted from an extensive and meticulous testing process conducted in three distinct phases with a strong focus on maintaining network stability and performance.
A prominent member of the XRP community, Krippenreiter, acknowledged the existence of three pull requests on GitHub aimed at enhancing throughput and stabilizing the ledger. Two of these requests have been completed and are set to be deployed with Rippled v1.12. However, Krippenreiter pointed out that these figures should be regarded as hypothetical, allowing room for interpretation and further scrutiny.
Ripple CTO’s Conflicting Claims On XRPL TPS
It’s worth noting that the previously advertised 1,500 TPS throughput for the XRP Ledger has been a subject of debate. In April, Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, revealed that the team had never witnessed the XRPL handling up to 1,500 TPS live on the mainnet.
Schwartz clarified that since the XRP Ledger’s launch in 2012, they had never observed it reaching up to 1,500 TPS on the live network. However, he acknowledged that the blockchain’s current configuration could support between 300 and 500 transactions per second on a live network.
Furthermore, he suggested that the initial 1,500 TPS figure on the website might have been “poorly worded” and could indicate the XRPL’s capability to consistently handle this level of load. As of now, Schwartz, one of the original architects of the XRP Ledger, has not commented on this latest development.