February 25 News, the debate over whether XRP Ledger (XRPL) is a centralized blockchain has quickly heated up in the crypto community. Justin Bons, founder and CIO of Cyber Capital, publicly questioned the decentralization of XRPL, arguing that its reliance on the Unique Node List (UNL) mechanism essentially makes it a "permissioned blockchain," deviating from the true permissionless crypto network concept. Justin Bons pointed out that XRPL validators typically refer to recommended node lists published by a central authority. Deviating from this list could lead to network forks, thereby structurally creating potential governance centralization risks. He also categorized XRPL alongside networks like Stellar, Hedera, and Algorand as "permissioned architectures," emphasizing that blockchains not based on PoW or PoS consensus might be closer to an authority proof model (PoA), making it difficult to achieve full trust minimization.