During his recent appearance on The Defiant, David Schwartz, chief technology officer at Ripple, has revealed that the only way to attack the XRP Ledger is to disrupt the global ordering of transactions. In such a scenario, the entire network would halt. 

Schwartz went on to explain how the Proof-of-Association (PoA), the XRP Ledger's unique consensus protocol works, stating that it puts all transactions in order to solve the double-spend problem. "Whichever transaction comes first is valid, whichever transaction comes second is invalid," he said. 

The mastermind behind the XRP Ledger has added that the only plausible attack on the XRP Ledger is to simply stop it. 

"There is nothing you can tell my software that will cause it to make your XRP somebody else's XRP," Schwartz said. 

At the same time, Schwartz believes that there is no incentive to stop the XRP since it is hard to imagine how it would be possible to turn this into revenue. 

The Ripple CTO claims that the XRP Ledger has only faced rather "generic" attacks so far. "No one has ever tried an attack on this level of sophistication." 

With that being said, Schwartz admits that there is a "risk" that someone opens an XRP short and attempts to perform a serious attack in order to push the price lower. However, there are both theoretical and practical reasons why XRP holders should not worry too much about this attack, according to the Ripple executive. 

Schwartz says that the people who let someone short XRP should be aware of such an attack since they would not let someone short the cryptocurrency to such a great extent. Moreover, the Ripple executive has noted that the network can only be attacked once for a short period of time. 

During his conversation with podcast host Camila Russo, Schwartz also weighed in on such issues as the XRP distribution, use cases, smart contracts as well as Ripple's ongoing legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.