XRP Ledger proposes reservation system against front-running

Ripple's former chief technology officer, David Schwartz, has proposed a new transaction reservation system for the XRP Ledger to address persistent community concerns about frontrunning and sandwich attacks. The proposal, detailed in recent days, follows a public debate over whether the ledger's design leaves ordinary traders exposed to exploitation by sophisticated actors who can view pending transactions.

The core concern, raised by technical commentators, is that transactions are publicly visible in a queue before a ledger closes and finalizes. This visibility, combined with the ledger's deterministic transaction ordering formula, could theoretically allow actors to analyze pending trades, calculate profitable opportunities, and submit their own transactions to strategically position themselves ahead of or behind a target trade. This practice, known as a sandwich attack, can result in worse execution prices and increased slippage for the original user.

In response, Schwartz acknowledged the theoretical risk but argued it is overstated in practice. He emphasized that all network participants have equal access to view pending transactions, and running a single validator does...