XRPL docs add XLS-50: validators state their host, cloud and network

Victoria Shinder09 October 2026, 07:532 min read

The XRP Ledger's official documentation gained three new fields for validator operators on 8 October, when the XRPL Dev Portal merged a change documenting XLS-50 in the xrp-ledger.toml reference. The fields let a validator describe where its server is hosted and on whose network — information that helps decide whether the validator set is dangerously concentrated.

What xrp-ledger.toml is. Operators publish this file on their domain to describe themselves and their validators: owner country, server country, which network the validator follows and which list of trusted validators (UNL) it uses. Clients and UNL publishers read it to learn who runs what.

The three new fields, all optional but recommended, for each [[VALIDATORS]] entry:

• server_location — a short human-readable description of the host, such as a provider and data centre ("DigitalOcean AMS3 (Amsterdam, NL)") or "Private datacenter (Utrecht area, NL)".
• server_cloud — true if the server runs on rented infrastructure (VPS, cloud or rented dedicated server), false for owned hardware, self-hosted or colocated.
• network_asn — the autonomous system number of the IP the validator uses for outbound connections.

The docs state the purpose directly: these fields help UNL publishers and other operators avoid concentrating validators on one provider, data centre or network. Country fields alone cannot show that ten validators in ten countries all sit on the same cloud provider's network.

And one warning. The change adds a caution: never publish a validator's IP address in the file. The design reveals provider, location and network at a level useful for diversity checks without giving attackers a direct target.

Why it matters. A consensus network is only as independent as the infrastructure under its validators. XLS-50 turns "how decentralised is the UNL?" from guesswork into something checkable — provided operators fill the fields in. For validator operators, adding three lines to an existing file is the cheapest contribution to that measurement.

Sources: XRPLF/xrpl-dev-portal pull request 3995, "Document XLS-50 validator TOML fields", merged 8 October 2026 — https://github.com/XRPLF/xrpl-dev-portal/pull/3995 ; XLS-50 specification — https://xls.xrpl.org/xls/XLS-0050-validator-toml-infra-details.html