In a recent tweet, Ripple CTO David Schwartz hinted at what he believes would be the most useful addition to the XRP Ledger network: a high-quality hub with reserved slots for UNL validators, other hubs and servers running XRPL applications.

This insight comes as Schwartz admits that he hasn’t personally operated XRPL infrastructure in recent years but now sees a unique opportunity to contribute.

"I haven't run any XRPL infrastructure myself in a few years. Looking at the network, it seems like the most useful thing would be a high-quality hub with reserved slots for UNL validators, other hubs, and servers serving applications on XRPL," Schwartz stated.

The Ripple CTO shared a current plan to deploy a server with an "AMD 9950X CPU, 256GB of RAM, a 2TB boot SATA SSD, 2x2TB NVME SSDs (s/w RAID 0) for NuDB, and a 10GB (unmetered) link." The server would run Ubuntu LTE and be housed in a data center in NYC.

The server would run as a production service to maximize uptime and reliability. Schwartz highlighted the initiative as his project, with no official connection to Ripple.

Despite the impressive specifications of the server, the Ripple CTO points out a seeming flaw in the server setup: It relies on a single hub. But this is not without cause; Schwartz explained that he wants to gather data from it to understand network behavior and performance, but no disruptive testing would be done unless there were very unusual circumstances justifying it.

XRP Ledger advances

Crypto data platform Dune recently shared an update on XRP Ledger's progress over the past month.

XRP Ledger recorded 70 million new transactions last month, bringing the total to 3.83 billion. Last week alone, 13.5 million transactions were added, with an average daily transaction of 1.8 million, which remains among the highest of any chain.

XRPL is evolving as a global stablecoin settlement layer. In July, Braza Bank issued $4.2 million BBRL, while daily RLUSD transactions increased from roughly 5,000 to more than 12,000 in a single month.