Ripple Plans 2027 XRP Ledger Overhaul After 1,500 TPS Criticism

Critics Call the Ledger Outdated

The accusation came first: detractors have branded the blockchain behind XRP an aging replica of legacy payment rails, pointing out that its throughput of roughly 1,500 transactions per second falls far short of Visa's daily average. Ripple's engineering director, Viijay Khanna, answered the charge on X on November 8, writing that a line of major performance improvements is scheduled through 2027. The exchange landed at a soft moment for the token, with the XRP price slipping 5.3% over the past 24 hours in our live monitoring. Ripple's engineering side has effectively quit the raw throughput contest altogether. Its position is that a layer-1 mainnet has no business processing millions of small retail payments itself: those transfers move to layer-2 rails such as the Interledger-based Dassie, while the mainnet concentrates on large institutional flows. The first concrete fix arrived this month. The newly released xrpld 3.3.0 cut node memory usage by 13% to 23%, and the engineering review traced the underlying problem not to a simple code defect but to how the system allocates memory: even after the cache was cleared, the software kept hold of server resources and refused to release them. Correcting that defect lets validators save materially on infrastructure costs. A follow-up fixCleanup update aimed at the operating environment was applied on November 4, widening the housekeeping sweep Ripple has started on its XRP Ledger base layer.

A $5.77M, 24-Amendment Wishlist

The housekeeping is framed as the opening move of a rework sized for commercial banking demand. Ripple president Monica Long has already said a substantial share of customer payments will be processed directly on the ledger, and cross-border settlement is to plug into new lending infrastructure built for banks rather than the flash loan mechanics common on other networks. The XRP Ledger Foundation has published a 2027 roadmap meant to keep the network standing under institutional inflows: $5.774 million budgeted for 24 complex amendments, with prototype audits completed along the way. The scope runs from WebAssembly-based native smart contracts under XLS-101 to lending pools, options under XLS-62, and interbank repo markets collateralized by tokenized assets. One computational chore also made the list: the native decentralized exchange burns heavy compute on pathfinding, routing trades across the venue's order types regardless of trading volume, and that overhead is slated for rework. Ripple ecosystem developers, with AI-assisted teams among them, are running strict testing and code optimization to rebuild the foundation, preparing for a point when RLUSD settlement, tokenized stock trading and interbank lending move from pilot programs to routine activity.

What the TPS Feud Misses

Our reading is that the argument was never really about speed but about division of labor: Ripple is betting that institutional users judge a ledger by settlement certainty and available features, not headline throughput, and that retail-scale activity belongs one layer up. The 2027 roadmap, for now, remains a promise, since the smart contracts, options and repo work exist as amendments and prototype audits rather than live code. The mitigation already in place is narrower but concrete: the 13% to 23% memory saving in xrpld 3.3.0 and the November 4 fixCleanup update cut validator costs today. Market patience looks thin, however, with the token logging a 20% monthly loss, its weakest run since February.