Ripple Drops Support for Redundant XRPL Bridge Amendment

Ripple has decided to withdraw its support for the XChainBridge amendment (XLS-38) on the XRP Ledger. The company cited that Axelar, a competitor solution, now handles the Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible sidechain role, making the native bridge redundant.

The XChainBridge was designed to provide a protocol-level framework for moving XRP and issued assets between connected networks, relying on independent witness servers to monitor events on each ledger. However, Ripple found that developers have not actively used this feature, with no production deployment requiring it.

Removing the amendment would eliminate over 10,000 lines of code from the XRPL server software, xrpld. The withdrawal process will be staged, starting with a pull request marking XChainBridge as obsolete in the xrpld codebase, and then upgrading servers to vote against activation.