David Schwartz, Ripple's Chief Technology Officer, emphasized It is an important security and trust distinction between blockchain-specific assets and assets bridged across different blockchains.
In a recent social media post, he revealed that his native assets are fully protected by his own network. This means that external systems cannot “steal” XRP because there are no other copies that can be compromised.
“XRP cannot be stolen from XRPL because there is no place other than XRPL for XRP to exist.” schwartz He explained.
If a problem arises with XRP itself (such as a bug or issue), the XRP Ledger's governance allows it to fix the problem.
He points to Bitcoin in 2013 as an example of a network solving its own native asset problem.
external risk
However, when you move an asset like ETH to XRPL via a bridge, that ETH still resides natively on Ethereum.
Even if the bridge is exploited or ETH is stolen on Ethereum, Ethereum governance will not intervene because the asset still resides on Ethereum and nothing is destroyed. In such cases, recovery is not guaranteed.
Even if governance is decentralized, there will always be points where assets can be stolen outside of the native network.
Cross-chain interactions therefore pose a fundamentally different level of risk (even when governance is properly structured).
