Ripple, the digital financial settlement solution based upon its native asset XRP has announced that the XRP Ledger ecosystem has expanded to 55 validator nodes, an increase of 120% since May.

These new validators include WorldLink, Telindus-Proximus Group, Bahnhof (Swedish ISP) and AT TOKYO Corporation, who joins 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, Ripple shared its strategy to make the XRP Ledger more decentralized. Ripple said they are committed to continued diversification and decentralization of the XRP Ledger validator ecosystem to further increase its resiliency and robustness.

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.”

Ripple noted they plan to add two third-party validators to 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 the 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
• The 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