RippleX engineer J. Ayo Akinyele released a detailed analysis on whether the XRP Ledger (XRPL) could someday support native staking, prompting discussion about how the network’s incentive and governance models may evolve. XRPL’s DeFi footprint remains modest after more than a decade of activity. Ripple’s leadership, including David Schwartz and Brad Garlinghouse, has voiced interest in expanding XRPL beyond payments into broader DeFi functionality.
Within his post, Akinyele notes that XRP has evolved well beyond its origins as a fast settlement asset, now playing roles in liquidity, real-time value transfer, and tokenization, with the recent XRP ETF underscoring growing relevance. He identifies two essentials for native staking: a source of staking rewards and a fair mechanism to distribute them. Schwartz also discussed the ideas, highlighting that XRPL’s Proof of Association consensus burns fees rather than redistributing them, and that validator trust would be earned through performance rather than financial stake.
Two concrete experiments are circulating within the engineering community. The first envisions a two-layer consensus where an inner 16-validator group is selected by an outer layer based on stake, with staking and slashing used to advance the ledger. The second keeps XRPL’s current consensus model but would fund zero-knowledge proofs with transaction fees so that smart contracts can be verified without every node running them. Schwartz described both ideas as technically impressive but not realistically viable “any time soon,” stressing the need to preserve XRPL’s stability and decentralization as programmability grows. XRPL’s DeFi footprint remains modest—DeFiLlama lists a TVL of $75.77 million—as XRP developers explore native staking as a potential long‑term catalyst that could broaden XRPL’s DeFi use and attract more on‑chain activity.
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