Ripple CTO David Schwartz recently shared an update about his XRP Ledger hub, which has been operational for months. The update drew responses from the crypto community, including praise for stability and questions about rippled upgrades and the XRP Ledger amendment process. The XRP Ledger uses an amendment system where validators vote on changes to transaction processing, and amendments pass with more than 80% support for two weeks. Some asked whether the amendment process could enable rippled upgrades, citing many versions of rippled on the dUNL servers.
Schwartz warned that such a change could weaken an essential constraint on the power of validators, potentially allowing nodes to accept rule changes they didn’t consciously choose. He preferred keeping the amendment process as coordination rather than governance and emphasized that a priority alert for node operators would be useful given the XRP Ledger’s rapid pace of change. In November, the rippled v2.6.2 release added a new fixDirectoryLimit amendment and a critical bug fix. The activation of the fixDirectoryLimit amendment on December 18 caused many nodes that did not upgrade to become amendment-blocked.
Less than three weeks after v2.6.2, Ripplex released rippled v3.0.0, which added new amendments and bug fixes, including amendments such as the lending protocol that have not yet been enabled but are nearing code completion. The X user asked Schwartz whether ‘update rippled’ could be added as a vote-enabled amendment; if 80% of validators vote to upgrade, the servers could perform a staged upgrade without user intervention. Schwartz reiterated that this could weaken a vital validator power constraint and again favored keeping the amendment process as coordination rather than governance, while noting a priority alert for node operators would be useful due to the XRP Ledger’s rapid pace of change.
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