American fintech Ripple Labs has released a major software upgrade for its XRP Ledger which has been labeled version 1.2.0.

In an official company blog post (published on February 13th), Ripple noted that its servers have been upgraded – in order to automatically detect attempts made to censor transactions on the XRP Ledger. As described in Ripple’s technical documentation, the XRP Ledger is a “decentralized cryptographic ledger powered by a network of peer-to-peer (P2P) servers.”

According to Ripple Labs, the XRP token has been developed to “bridge the many different currencies in use worldwide” as the digital asset can be used to conduct cross-border transactions with two different currency pairs. This means that XRP may be used to send payments from a USD bank account to a GBP (British pound) account – without having to pay relatively high currency conversion fees.

“Censorship Resistant” Software

As explained, Ripple’s software upgrade will make the XRP Ledger increasingly “resistant to censorship attempts.” According to Ripple’s notes for developers:

One of the major benefits of decentralized blockchain technologies, such as the XRP Ledger, is censorship resistance. Already highly resistant to censorship attempts, with the release of version 1.2.0 of the XRP Ledger, servers now have the ability to automatically detect transaction censorship attempts and issue warnings of increasing severity for transactions that a server believes should have been included in a closed ledger after several rounds of consensus.

Ripple’s blog post for developers mentions that the XRP Ledger 1.2.0 update has introduced a number of network changes (to be activated by February 27th, 2019). These include the fixTakerDryOfferRemoval, fix1578, and MultisignReserve amendments. As detailed in Ripple’s blog, the MultisignReserve codebase modification effectively reduces the reserve requirement with signer lists – when using Multisign.

Introduced in June 2016, multi-signing is one of three methods used to authorize transactions conducted on the XRP Ledger. When using the multi-signing option, users may select a combination of different private keys. This method allows the owner of an account to delegate power to several other users so that they can conduct transactions from the owner’s address.

Servers To Become “Amendment Blocked” If Upgrades Not Installed

Upgrading to the latest version of the XRP Ledger software is mandatory because users who don’t install the updates (associated with version 1.2.0) will have their servers “become amendment blocked.” According to Ripple, this means that the blocked servers “no longer understand the rules of the network.”

Servers that are amendment blocked have the following restrictions placed on them: