Ripple CTO Reacts to Speculation Around XRP Ledger Upgrade Ahead of 2026

Ripple CTO David Schwartz recently shared an update about his XRP Ledger hub, which has been operational for months now.

The Ripple’s CTO updates about his XRP Ledger hub drew responses from the crypto community, with an X user praising its stability while bringing up an important question pertaining to rippled upgrades and the XRP Ledger amendment process.

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

Amendment process for rippled upgrades?

The X user had asked if the amendment process could be applied in the case of enabling rippled upgrades, citing the case of many versions of rippled on the dUNL servers.

In November, the rippled v2.6.2 release was made available, which adds a new fixDirectoryLimit amendment and a critical bug fix. The activation of the “fixDirectoryLimit” amendment on Dec. 18 saw many nodes that did not upgrade to be “amendment blocked.”

Less than three weeks after the release of rippled v2.6.2, Ripplex made it known that another new version of rippled v.3.0.0 was available, which added new amendments as well as bug fixes. Version v3.0.0 also added amendments, such as the lending protocol, which have not been enabled but are nearly code complete.

Given this, the X user asked the Ripple CTO if it would be possible to add “update rippled” as a vote-enabled amendment. If 80% of validators vote to upgrade, the servers perform a staged upgrade without user intervention, the X user added.

The Ripple CTO responded, saying this might weaken an essential limitation on the power of validators. If this is done, validators could get nodes to accept rule changes that they did not consciously choose to accept.

Shedding further light on why the idea does not sit too well with him, Schwartz said he strongly prefers keeping the amendment process as a mere coordination mechanism and not as a primary governance mechanism.

The X user mentioned that with the fast pace of innovation on the XRP Ledger, synchronizing updates, testing and keeping an ear to the winds of change might be a lot of work. The Ripple CTO highlighted that “some kind of priority way to alert the node operator would be good.”