Ripple has recommended withdrawing the XRP Ledger's pending XChainBridge amendment (XLS-38), citing the replacement of its intended use case by Axelar and insufficient developer demand. According to reports from CoinDesk, Mayukha Vadari, a senior software engineer at RippleX, announced the recommendation on August 27. The pending amendment would add native asset bridges using independent witness servers between connected ledgers, but Ripple estimates removing it could eliminate more than 10,000 lines from the XRPL server codebase. The original goal behind XLS-38 was to allow seamless asset transfers between the XRPL mainnet and various custom sidechains, including private, permissioned, and experimental networks, with the framework involving witness servers to facilitate these transfers.
Ripple's decision was informed by a comprehensive evaluation of the witness-server model's trade-offs between security and decentralization that increase with bridge value. As reported in the latest recommendation, Ripple concluded that the witness-server model creates security, decentralization, and operational trade-offs that become more significant as the value locked in a bridge increases. The company determined that operating such a bridge for a public chain's native gas token was outside its core operational expertise at scale. The XLS-38 design aimed to support custom sidechains, including private chains, permissioned networks, and experimental environments, as well as a bridge between the XRPL EVM sidechain and the mainnet with XRP as the native gas token. The architecture places significant trust in a set of witness server operators, with the larger and more decentralized that set, the better the security, but also the greater the coordination overhead, the harder the governance, and the more diffuse the accountability.
The primary driver for Ripple's recommendation is the complete replacement of XLS-38's intended role by Axelar. As reported by CoinDesk, the XRPL EVM Sidechain launched with Axelar as its mainnet bridge in June 2025, with Axelar's validator network verifying cross-chain messages and connecting the sidechain with XRPL and other supported blockchains. Ripple stated that the EVM sidechain is now "better addressed" through Axelar, though this assessment was made by the company rather than through an independent security comparison. The company made the decision to use Axelar in June 2024, while still allowing the community to vote on XLS-38 at that time. Axelar offers interoperability with more than 55 blockchain networks and employs a network of over 75 validators, positioning it as a robust alternative to the natively built XLS-38 approach. However, Ripple notes that Axelar is not a direct substitute for every private-sidechain use case, and the company found too few concrete projects requiring XLS-38 during its review period.
The official XRPL registry lists XChainBridge as a pending amendment with a default "no" vote, and Ripple operates only one validator vote among the network's independent participants. As reported by CoinDesk, an XRPL amendment normally requires support from more than 80% of trusted validators for two continuous weeks before activation, requiring at least 29 affirmative votes from the current 35 validators. Ripple clarified that it does not have the authority to unilaterally remove XLS-38 from the XRP Ledger, and any withdrawal of the amendment must proceed through the network's established amendment process. The recommendation would proceed through staged software changes, beginning with a pull request marking XChainBridge as obsolete in the xrpld codebase. Developers who had been exploring XLS-38 for private sidechains were invited to share use cases through the XRPL developer Discord or GitHub, with a comment period remaining open before any further steps. The related fixXChainRewardRounding amendment, which preserves downward rounding when distributing rewards for cross-chain transactions, would also be withdrawn as part of the proposal.
The recommendation comes as the XRP Ledger demonstrates significant growth in dollar-denominated activity, with RLUSD crossing the $2 billion market capitalization threshold less than two years after its December 2024 launch. According to data from RWA.xyz and confirmations shared by Ripple on August 25, 2026, nearly half of the RLUSD supply, estimated at approximately $960 million to $975 million, now circulates natively on the XRP Ledger, while Ethereum holds a slight majority of between $1.05 billion and $1.13 billion. Monthly transfer volume has climbed from roughly $11.8 billion to $12.3 billion across more than 1.3 million transactions, while the number of RLUSD holders has risen above 82,000 to 84,000. This quick expansion places RLUSD among the larger regulated stablecoins and shows the growing role of the XRP Ledger as a venue for dollar-denominated digital asset activity, providing additional context for Ripple's decision to focus on more specialized interoperability approaches.
