Krutika Adani
Ripple CTO Joel Katz said that the reason for outage could be the de-sync between Ripple’s consensus algorithm and the validators.
Yes, validators are a part of consensus mechanism, which is the way transactions are verified in the XRPL.
At present, there does not seem to be any risk to the XRPL blockchain. However, as per Ripple CTO, more research is required.
Unlike other blockchains, XRPL is not a smart-contract-based blockchain but rather a unitary utility blockchain like Bitcoin and was built to transfer funds only.