Ripple executive says XRP should study Solana to stay competitive

Despite XRP’s steady progress, a new internal debate has emerged over what the network needs to stay competitive. 

A Ripple executive is now pointing to Solana’s (SOL) playbook as a model worth studying, even as XRP’s own chief technologist strongly disagrees.

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XRP needs Solana-style execution to stay competitive, Ripple executive says

Ripple’s global partner success lead Luke Judges surprised many in the XRP community when he openly praised parts of Solana’s operating model. 

Before joining Ripple, he spent years inside the Solana ecosystem, building two startups and running a validator with more than $30 million staked - giving him a rare, cross-chain perspective.

In an X post, Judges said many XRP holders “assume I’d hate Solana now that I’m at Ripple,” but argued the opposite. He highlighted Solana’s pragmatism, speed of execution, and go-to-market (GTM) decisiveness as traits other layer-1 networks, including the XRP Ledger (XRPL), could learn from.

Judges also warned against complacency, saying there is “no point burying your head in the sand pretending you’re the only chain in town.”

Most XRP folks probs assume I’d hate Solana now that I’m at Ripple. Truth is, a lot of the newer crowd doesn’t know I built two startups in the Solana ecosystem and ran a validator with >$30m staked. Living through the ride from $200 > $8 > back up earns real trust.

Solana’s far…

— LJ (@luke_judges) November 29, 2025

He pointed to the Ethereum Foundation’s recent shift toward faster, more practical GTM strategies.

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Solana’s validator collapse highlights Judges’ warning

One of the most striking data points supporting Judges’ remarks is Solana’s dramatic validator reduction.

On-chain data from Solana Compass shows:

• Over 2,500 active validators in 2023
• About 800 in December 2025 - a massive 68% decline

This aligns with Judges’ observation that Solana’s validator count is “dropping fast right now.”

In his original post, Judges wrote:

“Solana’s far from perfect… but it has pragmatism and speed that XRP (and every other L1) can learn from.”

This decline is tied to Solana’s 2025 validator pruning program, which removes nodes that fail performance thresholds. The result is a smaller but more competitive validator set shaped around high-quality operators.

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Judges argues that the approach - quick execution, practical decision-making, and a willingness to restructure - is what gives Solana an advantage in developer mindshare.

He suggests the XRPL could benefit from adopting some of this operational agility.

Ripple CTO Schwartz pushes back

Ripple CTO David Schwartz, one of the XRPL’s original architects, has long taken the opposite stance.

Schwartz emphasizes that the XRPL’s value comes from reliability, stability and predictability, not high-throughput experimentation.

He has repeatedly highlighted the risks of prioritizing raw performance, pointing to Solana’s history of outages as evidence that speed can compromise real-world financial use cases.

Where Judges encourages speed and GTM strategy, Schwartz stresses safety and institutional readiness.

Outages versus uptime: Solana and XRPL take different paths

The decentralization debate ultimately comes back to uptime: how often a network is actually available.

Solana has delivered some of the fastest block times and richest DeFi activity in the industry, but it has also suffered multiple network halts and performance incidents since launch, especially between 2020 and 2022, when congestion or bugs forced restarts lasting hours at a time.

By contrast, XRP Ledger has maintained near-continuous uptime for more than a decade, with negligible chain-wide halt on record. 

The reliability is a core part of Ripple’s pitch to enterprise users and a key reason Schwartz resists chasing more experimental designs.

Between Solana’s validator overhaul, Ethereum’s recent GTM pivot, and rising competition among L1s, the question now is whether XRP can evolve its strategy without giving up the stability that defines it.

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