Five Amendments Head to Validator Vote
The XRP Ledger is set to receive its most significant protocol upgrade in over a year, with the upcoming xrpld 3.3.0 release expected next week. The update puts five amendments in front of validators for approval, including two revised features that were previously pulled from the network after security researchers discovered flaws serious enough to warrant emergency intervention.
Jazzi Cooper, head of product at RippleX, confirmed Friday that the release carries five amendments: Confidential MPT, Batch, Permission Delegation, Sponsored Fees and Reserves, and Dynamic MPT. Each amendment requires at least 80% of trusted validators to back it for two consecutive weeks before activation — a threshold designed so the network, rather than any single entity, decides what ships.
The Return of Batch and Permission Delegation
The Batch and Permission Delegation amendments have been through the validator voting process before — and both failed. Batch, which allows up to eight transactions across different accounts to execute atomically so that either all succeed or none do, reached its voting phase in February. Security researchers then discovered a flaw in how the amendment validated signatures that would have allowed an attacker to execute transactions from any account without holding its keys. Validators were advised to reject it, and an emergency server release marked it unsupported to prevent activation. No funds were lost because the amendment never reached the main network.
Permission Delegation, which lets institutions grant another account narrowly scoped authority without handing over full signing power, was disabled in September 2025 after a vulnerability was disclosed. The bug allowed one account to charge transaction fees to another and potentially drain its balance. Both amendments have since been listed as obsolete, to be replaced by these revised versions that address the original security concerns.
Three New Features Enter the Fray
The remaining three amendments are entirely new. Confidential MPT combines zero-knowledge proofs with elliptic-curve encryption, allowing balances and transfer amounts on Multi-Purpose Tokens to remain private while still enabling auditors or regulators to verify them when required. This feature could prove critical for institutional adoption, where privacy concerns have been a significant barrier to on-chain tokenization.
Sponsored Fees and Reserves lets a bank or platform cover another account's XRP fees and reserve requirements, removing the need for every user to acquire XRP before transacting. This addresses a long-standing friction point for enterprises building on the XRP Ledger, where the requirement to hold XRP for transaction fees has complicated user onboarding.
Dynamic MPT allows an issuer to specify at creation which token properties can be changed later, avoiding a full migration to a new token when fees or metadata need updating. This flexibility could significantly reduce operational overhead for tokenized asset issuers who need to adjust parameters post-launch.
A Shift from Bug Fixes to New Features
The release marks a notable shift from where the ledger stood just two weeks ago. In mid-July, all five amendments sat in development on the XRP Ledger's amendment tracker, and what validators could actually vote on was a set of bug-fix bundles covering the lending protocol, single-asset vaults, the permissioned exchange, and multi-purpose tokens.
Approval is not automatic. The lending protocol and single-asset vault amendments have each drawn roughly a third of validator support against the 80% threshold they need, and Batch already has a record of being voted down. The coming weeks will reveal whether the revised versions have addressed enough concerns to clear the bar.
The upgrade comes at a pivotal moment for the XRP ecosystem. XRP trades near $1.06, down from earlier 2026 highs, but the ledger's push toward institutional-grade features — private transactions, sponsored fees, delegated permissions — signals an ambition to compete as a settlement layer for tokenized real-world assets. For broader crypto market context, see our analysis of the barriers facing crypto's next bull run.
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