XRP Rumors Come to a Grinding Stop as Coil’s Lead Scientist Says “Cobalt” is Yet

[Shahinaz]

Over the past couple of weeks, many members from within the global Ripple community have been spreading rumours regarding XRPs native ledger being updated with Cobalt – the firm's much awaited native protocol upgrade.

For those of our readers who might not be aware of what Cobalt really is, it is essentially a functional update that was submitted by Ethan MacBrough for the purpose of making the XRP Ledger more decentralized and secure. Not only that, many experts also claim that it will help in increasing the currency's TPS rate quite substantially.

In this regard, MacBrough’s whitepaper for Cobalt goes on to say that the update will make use of a “novel atomic broadcast algorithm” that can be deployed within networks with non-uniform trust (and no global agreement on participants).

The whitepaper also claims that Cobalt is “probabilistically guaranteed to make forward progress even in the presence of maximal faults and arbitrary asynchronies”.

Other key aspects of the upgrade include:

- Cobalt's intrinsic design allows it to make XRP's framework more efficient and decentralized by allowing for native “voting mechanisms” to be made more public.
- Cobalt allows for an open-entry group of nodes to agree on changes to some shared set of rules in a fair and consistent manner.
- Lastly, the upgrade accommodates certain trusted/untrusted nodes to behave maliciously.

How Did These Rumors Even Start?
All of the rumours regarding Cobalt first started to gain traction when a Twitter user called “Demludi” posted a message saying that the update had gone live and that XRPs native tx time had now been reduced to a mere 1 second.

https://twitter.com/demludi/status/1109828107601629185

The above mentioned tweet soon began to spread like wildfire, with a number of independent analysts and Youtubers using the tweet to regurgitate the same falsities that have been previously mentioned in this article. To add fuel to the fire, a couple of XRP charts began to show that some of XRPs native transactions were taking just a second or less to be processed.

At this point in the article, it should be mentioned that the last formal update provided by MacBrough on the status of Cobalt was given last year (during March) — when he went on record to state that the update would go live only by 2019.

More on the Matter
As soon as MacBrough caught wind of these weird developments, he immediately took to Twitter to do some damage control.

https://twitter.com/emacbrough/status/978616446459760641

Ethan also added that people need to understand that for an update of Cobalt's magnitude to go live, it takes a lot of changes to be made to the currency's consensus algorithm. Not only that, he also added that such a massive update needs to be publicly announced before it can go live — since network validators need to vote so as to accept or reject the proposed changes.

Final Take
In closing out this article, it should be added then when asked for an estimated launch date for Cobalt, Ethan did not comment on the matter and said that it was best for everyone to wait and watch. It now remains to be seen what the future has in store for Ripple.

source: https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/xrp-rumors-come-to-a-grinding-stop-as-coils-lead-scientist-says-cobalt-is-yet-to-go-live/