Ripple Recommends Retirement of Native Cross-Chain Bridge Amendment

Ripple has asked the XRP Ledger community to retire XLS-38, its long-pending native cross-chain bridge amendment. The company cited low developer demand and the fact that Axelar already handles the primary use case.

The amendment was never activated on mainnet, but removing it would cut more than 10,000 lines from the xrpld codebase. Ripple says this is a protocol-housekeeping call, not a live-bridge failure.

Ripple's engineering focus has shifted to live institutional-grade features, including privacy enhancements and tokenization upgrades. The team is also advancing a lending protocol and single-asset vault on XRPL.