David Schwartz, Ripple CTO Emeritus, said his private XRPL hub has become more stable over the two weeks to Sept. 17, with active connections returning above 500. The hub recorded about 501 active peers, close to a two-week high of 509, after earlier connection losses and a late-August manifest-flood period. Schwartz said a brief dip around Sept. 15–16 was a monitoring glitch rather than a genuine drop and has not identified what caused the improvement. The recovery followed the XRP Ledger 3.4.0 release, which included peer-protection improvements and new lending amendments, although Schwartz has not linked the changes to the hub’s performance. His hub is a high-capacity relay rather than a consensus validator, making its peer count a network-operations signal rather than a direct indicator for XRP’s price. The update comes as XRP spot ETFs have attracted more than $1.7 billion in inflows while XRP has remained under pressure after the Senate CLARITY Act cloture failure.