Ripple CTO Discusses XRP Ledger Amendment Process and Upgrade Governance Concerns

Source: CryptoNewsNet Original Title: Ripple CTO Reacts to Speculation Around XRP Ledger Upgrade Ahead of 2026 Original Link: Ripple CTO David Schwartz recently shared an update about his XRP Ledger hub, which has been operational for months now.

The update drew responses from the crypto community, with users praising its stability while raising important questions about rippled upgrades and the XRP Ledger amendment process.

XRP Ledger Amendment System

XRP Ledger uses an amendment system that utilizes the consensus process to approve any changes affecting transaction processing, with validators voting on them. If an amendment receives more than 80% support for two weeks, the amendment passes and applies permanently to all subsequent ledger versions.

Amendment Process for Rippled Upgrades

A community member asked if the amendment process could be applied to enable rippled upgrades, citing the case of many versions of rippled on the dUNL servers.

Schwartz responded with concerns about this approach:

I think this would weaken an essential limitation on the power of validators. With that change, validators could get nodes to accept rule changes that they didn’t consciously choose to accept. I strongly prefer keeping the amendment process as a mere coordination mechanism.

Recent Rippled Updates

In November, rippled v2.6.2 was released, adding a new fixDirectoryLimit amendment and critical bug fixes. The activation of the “fixDirectoryLimit” amendment on December 18 caused many nodes that did not upgrade to be “amendment blocked.”

Less than three weeks later, a new version rippled v3.0.0 became available, which added new amendments and bug fixes. Version 3.0.0 also introduced amendments such as the lending protocol, which have not been enabled but are nearly code complete.

Community Proposal

The community member proposed adding “update rippled” as a vote-enabled amendment, suggesting that if 80% of validators vote to upgrade, servers would perform a staged upgrade without user intervention.

Schwartz cautioned that this might weaken essential limitations on validator power. He emphasized that he strongly prefers keeping the amendment process as a mere coordination mechanism rather than as a primary governance mechanism.

However, Schwartz acknowledged the challenges, noting that “some kind of priority way to alert the node operator would be good” given the fast pace of innovation on the XRP Ledger and the work required for synchronizing updates and testing.