Distributed exchange systems are radically changing how we trade money for assets, services, or goods. Ripple, in particular, is unique in its kind. It is based on consensus and trust between its users, and it stores their accounts and their transactions on a distributed ledger. It allows exchanging currencies (e.g. Euro, Dollar, etc.), physical goods (e.g. cinnamon, or truffle), and also assets or shares. Its transactions usually complete in a handful of seconds, no matter where their destination is. For all these reasons, Ripple is attracting the increasing interest of banks, financial institutions and economic businesses. Today, it is the second most used distributed exchange system.
In this project, we aim at thoroughly analyzing Ripple. Among other things, we investigate how it is used and its relation with the other financial markets. We study how it was attacked in the past and we test the robustness of its payments network. We challenge the anonymity of its users. We consider to what extent their privacy can be jeopardized by analyzing their Ripple transactions, and whether their accounts on multiple exchange systems can be linked together. In addition, we focus on the consensus protocol that guarantees the safety of the system, and on the users that participate to it.
Distributed exchange systems are still relatively new. For this reason, they started to attract the interest of the researchers from all over the world only in recent times. Ripple, in particular, is among the top three most used distributed exchange systems and has the potential to radically change the financial world as we know it. Still, it has never been analyzed in-depth before. With this project, we aim at making up this shortfall and at presenting a ground-breaking work that will be of interest to researchers both in the fields of economics and of computer science.
We hope that the effects of this work will be manifold. We aim at improving Ripple in its entirety and, in particular, we will focus on its safety, its security, and on the privacy of its users. We intend to create an entirely new set of tools, specifically designed to analyze Ripple. We will do so by developing the first automated analysis framework for Ripple, that we will then release as an open-source contribution to the research community. Finally, we plan to present the results of our work to the top-notch researchers of our community. We will first submit an academic paper to the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM 2018) and, later, we will submit the extended results of our work to the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC).
In conclusion, we believe that the traditional financial world is on the edge of a radical change. Ripple, with its decentralized freedom, its democratic consensus, and its currency independence, is leading the revolution for the distributed financial world of the future. For these reasons, we deem important to evaluate its robustness, to analyze to what extent the privacy of its users can be jeopardized, and to discover the real degree of their anonymity. With this project, we will help building the safer, faster, and democratic financial system of tomorrow.