‘An Incredible Year Ahead’: Ripple Engineer Outlines What’s Coming to XRPL

In a recent tweet, RippleX head of engineering, J. Ayo Akinyele, shares expectations for the year 2026.

According to Akinyele, 2026 is set to be an incredible year with key features including privacy, programmability, interoperability via zero knowledge proofs and DeFi (on-chain lending) coming to XRP Ledger.

Akinyele adds that formal verification and a more modular XRPL implementation are also coming to the network.

The expectations for 2026 build on the foundation that was laid through various upgrades and amendments in 2025.

XRPL v3.0.0 was released in December, which adds new amendments, including the lending protocol, which is nearly code-complete but not yet open for voting.

The amendments for the XRP lending protocol are expected to enter validator voting in late January, marking a major step toward activating protocol-native credit markets on XRPL.

Ripple is in collaboration with Common Prefix to specify and formally verify key components (Payment Engine and the Consensus Protocol) of XRP Ledger.

In December, the first formal specification of XRPL Payment Engine, which powers every XRP transfer and multi-asset payment on the network, was published. This marks an important step toward bringing formal verification, the standard used in banking and aerospace, to core XRPL components.

Privacy, programmability coming

Last September, Ripple unveiled its road map for XRP Ledger, which emphasized two themes shaping the next stage of XRPL’s institutional DeFi evolution: the launch of a native lending protocol and the integration of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for privacy.

XRPL’s next major push is programmable privacy, with ZKP integrations already being explored. The first use case: confidential multi-purpose tokens (MPTs), scheduled for launch in Q1, 2026. MPTs will support privacy-preserving collateral management, a key requirement for institutional adoption of tokenized finance.

As regards programmability, progress has been made on extensions, which allow developers to add small, verifiable pieces of code to native features such as escrows or AMMs. Smart Escrows introduce a new layer of programmability to the existing Escrow primitive.