Ripple Seeks to Retire Native Cross-Chain Bridge Amendment
Ripple has asked the XRP Ledger community to retire its long-pending native cross-chain bridge amendment, XLS-38. In a formal recommendation published on August 27, David Fuelling of RippleX cited low developer demand and the fact that Axelar already handles the primary use case.
The XLS-38 was never activated on mainnet and Ripple says withdrawing it would cut more than 10,000 lines from the xrpld codebase. The company has shifted its engineering focus to live institutional-grade features such as privacy enhancements and tokenization upgrades.
Ripple cannot remove XLS-38 on its own and the plan involves three stages: marking XChainBridge as VoteBehavior, Obsolete in the xrpld repository, stopping validators from voting for the amendment, and then deleting the code entirely. The door is left open for any team that presents an active build requiring a native XLS-38 bridge.
The withdrawal of XLS-38 is seen as routine codebase hygiene by holders, with no mainnet assets locked in the bridge. Institutional confidence in XRP remains strong, with Goldman Sachs returning as the largest XRP ETF holder and reinforcing the institutional bid beneath XRP.