Ripple Recommends Withdrawal of XRP (XRP) Ledger's XLS-38 Bridge Amendment

Ripple Moves to Scrap XLS-38

Ripple has recommended that the XRP Ledger community withdraw the long-running XChainBridge amendment, known as XLS-38, the proposal that was designed to bring native cross-chain bridging to the XRP (XRP) network. According to the company, the technology is no longer needed for its primary intended use case and has failed to attract sufficient developer demand. In a post shared on X, RippleX, the company's developer arm, stated that the use case which originally motivated XLS-38's development is now fully addressed — and in its view better addressed — by the Axelar integration. The amendment itself was written to provide a native bridging framework for the XRP Ledger, allowing assets to move between the XRPL mainnet and connected sidechains through servers known as “witness servers.” The system was built to support custom sidechains, including private and permissioned networks as well as experimental application-specific chains, and it was originally intended to serve as the bridge connecting the XRP Ledger to the XRPL EVM Sidechain, the environment where EVM-compatible applications can run against XRPL. Ripple argued that keeping the dormant implementation in the codebase has become a liability, and that removing XChainBridge would allow developers to eliminate more than 10,000 lines of code. The company did leave the door open: developers genuinely building around XLS-38 have been asked to present compelling use cases that could convince Ripple to reverse its position.

The withdrawal cannot happen unilaterally. Ripple controls only one validator vote on the XRP Ledger, an open-source network that operates independently of the company and updates through votes cast by its validators, so the removal must proceed through the network's standard amendment process. That governance reality shapes the entire episode: Ripple's statement is a recommendation to the community, not an executed change, and the final outcome will be decided by the ledger's distributed validator set rather than by the company itself. The background to the decision dates back to June 2024, when Ripple first selected the Axelar network as the interoperability layer for the XRPL EVM Sidechain. At that time, the company said it would continue leaving XLS-38 available for a community vote, preserving the option of a native bridging path. Axelar's network currently runs more than 75 validators and supports broad interoperability with more than 50 blockchain networks, giving the EVM Sidechain a cross-chain connection that spans far beyond the XRPL ecosystem. Ripple now says there is little evidence that meaningful developer demand for XLS-38 exists alongside that integration, a claim that stands in contrast to the broader cross-chain tooling space where atomic swap mechanisms and bridging protocols remain an active build area for many altcoin networks.

Our reading is that this is a governance test as much as a technology decision. XLS-38 is a dormant proposal — no assets have flowed through it — yet its fate now rests with validators who must weigh Ripple's recommendation against the ledger's principle of keeping options open. If the community ratifies the withdrawal, it would mark a rare instance of the XRP Ledger formally deleting a shipped amendment rather than accumulating unused code, and the first clear signal of how validators treat corporate-backed cleanup proposals. If developers produce the compelling use cases Ripple requested, the amendment could survive.