Consensus Structure

Written by Dave Cohen, David Schwartz, and Arthur Britto.

This article provides a high level overview of the XRP Ledger, the information it stores, and how transactions result in changes to the ledger.

When building applications on the XRP Ledger, it is important to understand this process, so as not to be surprised by the behavior of XRP Ledger APIs and their effects.

Introduction

The peer-to-peer XRP Ledger network provides a worldwide, shared ledger, which gives applications authoritative information about the state of its contents. This state information includes:

- settings for each account
- balances of XRP and tokens
- offers in the distributed exchange
- network settings, such as transaction costs and reserve amounts
- a timestamp

Consensus and Validation

The peer-to-peer XRP Ledger network consists of many independent XRP Ledger servers (typically running rippled) that accept and process transactions. Client applications sign and send transactions to XRP Ledger servers, which relay these candidate transactions throughout the network for processing. Examples of client applications include mobile and web wallets, gateways to financial institutions, and electronic trading platforms.

The servers that receive, relay and process transactions may be either tracking servers or validators. The major functions of tracking servers include distributing transactions from clients and responding to queries about the ledger. Validating servers perform the same functions as tracking servers and also contribute to advancing the ledger history.