Ripple CTO David Schwartz not too long ago addressed misconceptions in regards to the UNL of the XRP ledger. Distinctive Node Checklist (UNL) refers to a server’s listing of trusted validators.
In a tweet, the X consumer said that he was unable to alter the trusted validator on his public XRP-GUI pockets and indicated that he’s contemplating utilizing an exterior UNL offered by Ripple. He additionally requested the query, “99% of the inhabitants depends on UNL revealed by Ripple, so what’s stopping them from working UNL?”
UNL impacts how the community strikes ahead. The pockets simply observes it. And what will we do with UNL? If a node doesn’t agree with UNL’s validators, the community will cease.
— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) October 18, 2025
The tweet drew a response from Ripple’s CTO David Schwartz, who revealed the character of UNL for the XRPL community. Schwartz responded to an X consumer’s query about why they cannot change their trusted validators by saying that UNL impacts how the community strikes ahead and that wallets are additionally observing this.
Schwartz dismissed considerations about doable community manipulation, including that if a node disagrees with UNL’s validators, the community will probably be shut down.
All XRP Ledger servers are natively configured with UNL, which determines which validation votes to take heed to and which votes to discard through the consensus course of.
why is it essential
Every server operator has full management over which validators are included within the UNL.
Nonetheless, if the 2 servers are working at utterly completely different UNLs, they might attain completely different conclusions about when the ledger (and the transactions inside the ledger) are validated. This can lead to networks bifurcating as events on completely different sides are unable to mutually conform to transact with one another.
To keep away from forks, servers on the XRP Ledger have to be configured with UNLs which might be extremely redundant with one another.
The XRP Ledger makes use of a system of beneficial validator lists to make it simple to acquire a dependable different validator listing that has lots of overlap with different validators. Presently, the default configuration of the XRP Ledger server makes use of two lists. One is revealed by the XRP Ledger Basis and the opposite by Ripple. The time period default UNL (typically abbreviated as dUNL) refers back to the set of validators included in these lists.
