Ripple has proposed withdrawing XChainBridge, a native bridging feature on the XRP Ledger known as amendment XLS-38, in favor of relying on Axelar, an external cross-chain network, to connect XRPL to other blockchains.
XLS-38 was designed to let XRPL move assets to and from other chains without depending on an outside company. It worked through a network of “witness servers” that would watch transactions across chains and confirm they happened correctly. The idea was that it could support private chains, permissioned networks, and eventually connect the XRPL EVM Sidechain back to XRPL mainnet.
When the EVM Sidechain launched, Ripple chose Axelar over XLS-38 to handle that bridge. Ripple said the witness server model creates a tricky balance. The more decentralized the group running it, the safer it is, but the harder it becomes to coordinate and govern.
Ripple said building and running bridges between blockchains is specialized work, and it didn’t think it had the right expertise to do it safely at scale. Axelar, by contrast, already runs more than 75 validators and has experience securing connections across over 55 blockchains.
Ripple gave the XRPL community over a year to show real demand for XLS-38, but said no serious projects emerged that specifically needed it.
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});| Security | Safety depended on how decentralized its witness server group was. | Brings a large, established validator network with years of operating history. |
| Attack Surface | Keeping unused code in the system means more code that could contain vulnerabilities (estimated 10,000 lines). | External cross-chain network approach avoids adding excess code to the XRPL mainnet. |
| Decentralization | Meant to be fully native to XRPL. | Separate, external network; XRPL depends on another project’s infrastructure. |
| Maintenance | Maintaining without real usage created ongoing work with no clear benefit. | Maintenance falls on its own team instead. |
| Third-Party Dependency | Avoided relying on outside companies. | Means trusting a separate network’s validators and technology going forward. |
Ripple stressed this is a recommendation, not a final decision, since it controls only one vote among XRPL’s validators. If the community agrees, the amendment would first be marked inactive, then gradually lose support as validators upgrade, before being fully removed from the code.
