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In response to a question posed by a user on X, David Schwartz, Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, recently addressed the XRP Ledger’s scalability in terms of (TPS) transactions per second. X user Chad Steingraber had asked if it was true that the XRP Ledger "through optimization" could potentially scale up to 50,000 TPS.

Schwartz noted that future improvements — such as those in CPUs, storage, networking and internal architecture — could indeed raise the potential TPS to such high levels: "It's not hard to imagine that future improvements in CPUs, storage, networking, and internal architecture raise the potential TPS to those kinds of levels."

The Ripple CTO feels that TPS is great for bragging about and that having spare TPS allows computationally intensive features to be implemented.

Schwartz provided examples, stating that the XRPL could not have integrated an Automated Market Maker (AMM) if it had already reached its computational limit and that adding programmability would also be impossible in this scenario. Along these lines, the Ripple CTO highlighted the necessity of headroom for evolution.

Here's twist

Despite the benefits, Schwartz highlighted the severe drawbacks of running a layer-1 blockchain at high TPS levels.

Increased TPS might lead to higher costs for bandwidth, storage and computing power for all participants. This increase in costs could result in fewer people finding it worthwhile to run a node, thereby reducing the overall node count. A lower node count means more users would have to rely on others' nodes, which in turn diminishes decentralization — a core principle of blockchain technology.

Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin made its global debut yesterday, marking a significant milestone. RLUSD will first be offered on Uphold, Bitso, MoonPay, Archax and CoinMENA, with further listings on platforms, including Bullish, Bitstamp, Mercado Bitcoin, Independent Reserve, Zero Hash and others to follow over the coming weeks.