David Schwartz, Ripple's Chief Technical Officer, was once again dragged into the public arena to clarify what XRP Ledger actually does — and more importantly, what it does not do. The discussion began after a $120 million exploit hit major DeFi protocol Balancer, bringing back to life the criticism that most decentralized platforms rely on complex smart contracts and "middlemen" to keep the system alive. One XRP community member called it Ethereum's "design flaw," arguing that XRPL’s 10-year-old architecture was built precisely to avoid it. Who owns XRP Ledger? Schwartz did not just agree. In a detailed thread, the Ripple CTO explained that validators on XRPL "don’t earn from transactions" and exist only to help nodes agree on one global order of transactions to solve the double-spend problem. Contrasting with Bitcoin and Ethereum, where miners or stakers are paid to include transactions in blocks, XRPL validators provide services to the nodes, not account holders, he explains. Thus, as it stands, every XRP Ledger node already knows which transactions are valid, while validators only decide when each should appear on the ledger. In brief, validators do not intermediate, they synchronize. The structure was intentionally designed this way to remove rent-seeking behavior from the network and to ensure that transaction finality depends on math, not incentives or bidding systems that can be gamed over time. In other words, XRPL runs not on trust or reward loops, but on ordered logic — a design Ripple believes still separates it from every smart-contract-driven chain trying to fix yesterday’s problems.