XRP Strange Network Behavior? Ripple CTO Puzzled at This Finding

Weeks back, Ripple CTO David Schwartz revealed his intentions of setting up a hub dedicated to UNL validators, other hubs and servers running XRPL applications. This, as a single server, would operate as a production service aiming for maximum uptime and reliability.

The server would rely on a single hub, with Schwartz revealing his plans to gather data from it to understand network behavior and performance, and no disruptive testing would be done unless there were very unusual circumstances justifying it.

In a recent feedback, the Ripple CTO stated that he had received his first bit of weird data from the hub. According to Schwartz, while tracking peer round-trip latency at application level, there was a weird spike that started at 1:59 a.m. PDT, which showed significantly worse performance for about 15 minutes.

What was puzzling to the Ripple CTO is that it was unknown if the issue was caused by the hub, as a roughly constant latency increase would be expected for all connections. “Maybe it was an issue with the hub’s network connectivity?” Schwartz asked.

Strange network behavior?

Three peer connections (out of 343) dropped at the time of the incident. Traffic dropped very slightly, likely as a result of peer disconnections, but no other anomalies were visible.

I have my first bit of weird data from the hub. I’m tracking peer round-trip latency at application level and there was a weird spike that shows significantly worse performance for a period of about 15 minutes.

The spike starts at about 1:59 AM PDT.
The thing that puzzles me… pic.twitter.com/binWG2KeYL

— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) August 15, 2025

Providing further context, the Ripple CTO stated: “I only have one day of good instrumentation, so I don’t know if this is a fluke, an event that will repeat every day at the same time, or something that will happen randomly.”

Schwartz states likely reasons for the abnormal behavior, flagging a hiccup in network bandwidth as the most likely explanation. “Network congestion is my leading theory,” he said.

Going forward, Schwartz stated he was working on radically improving the instrumentation of the hub to know a lot more if it happens again and also add Alloy/Grafana monitoring.

In a positive XRP Ledger development, amendments fixAMMv1_3, fixEnforceNFTokenTrustlineV2 and fixPayChanCancelAfter have gained majority and have started their 14-day countdown timer. If these amendments retain support through the countdown period, they might be activated Aug. 29, 2025.

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