- Ripple’s proposed lending system for banks and payment companies has picked up three XRP Ledger validator votes in about three weeks, reaching 22, but it still needs 29 — more than 80% of the 35 validators on the network’s default list — for two consecutive weeks before it can go live, CoinDesk reported. That leaves the amendment seven votes short of the level that would start a two-week activation clock.
- As of Wednesday, data showed the LendingProtocol amendment and its first patch, LendingProtocolV1_1, at 22 yes votes each. SingleAssetVault, the change that creates the pools lenders deposit into, had 23. Lending draws its money from those vaults, so both have to clear the bar. On Oct. 19, when CoinDesk last counted, lending had 19 votes and the vaults had 21. A Nov. 10 snapshot already showed 22 and 23, so the new votes were in by Tuesday and the count had not moved by Wednesday.
- The design is unusual for on-chain credit. A lender deposits XRP or another token into a vault, and a loan broker lends it out for a fixed term with no collateral posted by the borrower. The ledger’s documentation says the system “relies on off-chain underwriting and risk management,” leaving the broker’s judgment — backed by some first-loss capital the broker puts up — as the main protection for depositors. Ripple has pitched the setup to payment companies that need cash while a cross-border settlement clears.
- Not every vote went up. An amendment called ConfidentialTransfer, which would hide token balances, slipped from 22 to 21 over the period, and DynamicMPT, which lets token issuers change a token’s settings after launch, fell from 18 to 16. The public dashboard publishes counts only, with “no per-validator rows on any public surface,” so the validators who flipped can be counted but not named.
What Happened?
Developers are still building ahead of the vote. A Nov. 4 pull request, numbered 8685, would add a third lending amendment, LendingProtocolV1_2, to let a bundle of transactions that opens a loan fail as one if another loan on the same broker lands first. A cleanup fix that repaired parts of the lending code before anyone could use it went live on Nov. 4 at ledger 108,112,129. SingleAssetVault now needs six more yes votes, and the lending amendment needs seven. Lending cannot open until two weeks after both hold 29.
Why It Matters?
The gap between 22 votes and 29 is still material, and the three-vote gain since mid-October does not guarantee the rest will follow. If the system does reach the threshold, it would introduce fixed-term, uncollateralized loans into a public ledger used by payment firms — a model that looks more like traditional bank credit, with off-chain underwriting and first-loss capital, than like overcollateralized DeFi lending. That is the feature for Ripple’s bank pitch and the risk for depositors: credit quality would live off-chain, even as the loans settle on-ledger. The lack of a public per-validator tally also makes the remaining seven votes harder for outside investors to track.
What’s Next?
The next milestones are straightforward: whether LendingProtocol can get to 29 yes votes, whether SingleAssetVault gets the six it still needs, and whether both can hold that supermajority for two full weeks. Until then, the V1_2 amendment is preparatory work, not a launch. Holders of XRP will be watching the validator counts; banks and payment firms evaluating the product will be watching the off-chain underwriting standard as much as the vote.
Affected Tickers and Coins: XRP
Source: CoinDesk
