In a recent tweet, Ripple engineer Mayukha Vadari highlights the major advantage of native multisign on the XRP ledger, which is zero smart contract risk. As multisigning is baked directly into the protocol and not patched together through 3rd-party smart contracts, the attack vector literally doesn’t exist for XRPL accounts, Vadari added.
Vadari was reacting to a recent report by Blockaid, which detected an exploit targeting the SquidRouterModule on Ethereum and Base networks. In this incident, 86 Gnosis Safes were drained for about $3 million in nearly 2 hours. All stolen tokens were swapped to DAI via attacker-controlled Uniswap V3 pools.
In this scenario, the RippleX software engineer highlights a security edge that the XRP Ledger possesses: the native multisign, which eliminates attack risk. Vadari adds that “this is why native features matter.”
Responding to a critic who claimed that the Bitcoin ecosystem has lots of apps that support multi-signing, whereas in the XRPL ecosystem, it is virtually non-existent, Vadari clarified the situation.
Vadari clarified that while not many self-custodial apps support the multi-sign feature, lots of custodial apps do (which are usually the bigger users of the feature anyway). She also highlighted a very different implementation from Bitcoin, which essentially only had basic M-of-N support until Taproot in 2021. Multi-signing on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) launched in June 2016.
XRP multisign feature explained
The XRP Ledger supports a native multisign scheme. Multi-signing in the XRP Ledger is a means of authorizing transactions for the XRP Ledger by using a combination of multiple secret keys. Any combination of authorization methods can be enabled for a user address, including multi-signing, a master key pair, and a regular key pair. (The only requirement is that at least one method must be enabled.)
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This has numerous advantages over the schemes other ledgers use. For example, the signers or quorum can be changed without changing the receiving address. Individual signers can rotate their own credentials without disturbing the funds on the ledger.