Energy Consumption Analysis of XRP Validator

Abstract

The XRP Ledger is an open-source payment system with a primary focus on providing an efficient cross-border payment network. The advancement of the XRP Ledger relies on the agreement of validator nodes which propose candidate transaction sets to be included in the next ledger through an iterative consensus process. Unlike Bitcoin miners, there is no reward scheme to incentivize volunteers to run an XRP validator node. In this article, the energy consumption of an XRP validator is studied to quantify the cost to run this node. Various parameters in the configuration settings are also modified to study the change in the energy consumed. Using these results, estimated annual electricity costs are compared.