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Today we are excited to announce that the XRP Ledger ecosystem has expanded to 55 validator nodes, an increase of 120 percent since May. These new validators include WorldLink, Telindus-Proximus Group, Bahnhof (Swedish ISP) and AT TOKYO Corporation, and join a growing network of leading companies and organizations currently validating transactions on the XRP Ledger, including Microsoft, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and CGI.

Last month, we shared our strategy to make the XRP Ledger more decentralized. We are committed to continued diversification and decentralization of the XRP Ledger validator ecosystem to further increase its resiliency and robustness (you can learn more about validators, the servers that confirm transactions on the ledger, here). Ensuring our enterprise-ready public blockchain is as strong as possible through additional validators is necessary to make XRP the globally preferred digital asset for payments.

Mathew Pulickel, Senior Vice President, Emerging Technology at WorldLink, said: “We believe Ripple’s network will revolutionize commerce in the future and the way our customers do business, and that’s why we have chosen to run a validator node on the XRP Ledger. In the same way that communication and document sharing dramatically improved with email, Ripple and the digital asset XRP will have an equally impactful effect on the time and cost associated with cross-border payments.”

We also plan to add two third-party validators to the XRP Ledger’s Unique Node Lists (UNLs) in the coming months. UNLs are an important subset of trusted nodes that can validate transactions, vote on protocol changes via amendments and modify fees on ledger. While Bitcoin chooses validators solely on mining power, XRP Ledger validators are chosen based on performance, reliability, and security. This includes assessing a possible UNL against the following criteria:

Server topology

Server uptime, including 24-hour incident response capabilities

Speed of server updates following new releases

Network agreement rate

Verification with Extended Validation Certificate

Public Attestation via ripple.txt file or DNS TXT record

If your organization is interested in setting up a validator on the XRP Ledger, you can find more information here.