A proposal to expand the XRP Ledger's Memo field 1,200 times has sparked a heated technical debate in the crypto community. Matt Hamilton, Ripple's former developer relations director, warns the change would force every node to store large media files forever, threatening decentralization, and points to a Filecoin-style hybrid approach as an alternative.
Matt Hamilton, a former developer relations director at Ripple, has directly criticized the new expansion plan, calling it "a really bad idea".
The proposal, authored in part by Vet from the XRPL Foundation, would raise the transaction Memo field's limit by 1,200 times, from 1 KB to approximately 1.3 MB. That expansion would let users embed images, PDF documents, music tracks, short video clips, and software source code directly into ledger transactions.
Supporters justify the change on the principle that participants willing to pay the fee should have the option to store their content on-chain, and some blockchain enthusiasts have already begun discussing the upgrade's limitless potential. Yet the debate has also drawn calls for a sober assessment of the risks.
Hamilton argues the proposal clashes with the XRP Ledger's core design. The blockchain functions as a distributed payment ledger, not a file-sharing service, and every validator and node must store the entire transaction history to keep the network secure and synchronized.
If users start filling the ledger with large media files, the database would grow exponentially, Hamilton warned. That growth would raise hardware requirements, price out independent node operators, and, over time, threaten the network's decentralization.
Hamilton instead points to specialized decentralized storage networks such as Filecoin, which are built to handle large files. He argues a hybrid approach combining XRPL with such networks would let users work with any type of media while keeping the XRP Ledger fast, lightweight, and scalable, as it was originally designed to be.
Source: U.Today
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