XRP Ledger lending plan holds at 22 validator votes as quantum work starts

Two changes, one network

Ripple and the XRP Ledger community are pursuing two changes at different stages: an uncollateralised lending system for banks and payment providers, and protection against future quantum attacks. Neither has been activated.

The credit mechanism is the closer of the two. Support among validators on the network's standard list rose from 19 to 22 votes, according to the report, still short of the 29 of 35 needed and held for 14 consecutive days. A second vote covers SingleAssetVault, the component used to supply capital for the loans; it has also not reached the threshold.

Loans without on-chain collateral

Under the plan, users would place XRP or other digital assets in dedicated pools, and intermediaries would issue loans from them with a set repayment date. Borrowers would not have to post collateral on the blockchain, a departure from the collateralised lending common in DeFi.

The trade-off is risk for the parties supplying capital. Creditworthiness would be assessed off-chain, and the intermediaries would carry the responsibility, committing part of their own money as a first loss buffer. If that were not enough, losses could reach the assets deposited by capital providers.

Ripple is aiming the product at banks and payment service providers that need short-term liquidity for cross-border transfers, the report said.

Quantum-resistant signatures on the 2027 plan

The XRP Ledger Foundation has put a proposal called Quantum into its 2027 roadmap. It would add signatures resistant to quantum attack, letting users move to new keys gradually without raising the base transaction fee.

A public key is visible once a transaction is signed, and a sufficiently advanced quantum computer could in theory use that data to reconstruct a private key and impersonate the account holder. The proposal would use ML-DSA-44, a digital signature scheme standardised by NIST in 2024, as an alternative to the current key, which the user could later disable. Validator signatures and the lists that publish them would also be covered.

The cost lands on node operators. A transaction signed post-quantum would need about 3,627 additional bytes, taking its total size from 1,704 to 5,331 bytes, while the base fee stays the same and transaction fees in XRP are burned. The foundation left open whether transaction size should affect the cost of executing it in future.

Timing and open questions

A migration analysis is planned for the first half of 2027, followed by specification work, development, audits and verification, potentially at the end of 2027 or in 2028. Ripple expects the network to be ready by 2028, with classic and post-quantum signatures coexisting at first. Final deployment depends on tests and approval of the protocol change.

Unresolved is how accounts left on old keys could be recovered if current cryptography becomes breakable before their owners migrate. The report also stated that neither change guarantees an effect on the XRP price.