The XRP Ledger (XRPL) activated its “Credentials” amendment on September 4, 2025 at 03:51:21 UTC, bringing a native, standards-aligned identity layer to the base protocol and enabling KYC/AML-aware flows directly on-chain. The upgrade follows the XRPL’s amendment governance model—an 80%+ validator supermajority maintained for two weeks—culminating in an EnableAmendment event that permanently switches the new rules on for all subsequent ledgers.
Ripple’s open-source spec site captures the institutional rationale succinctly: “Credentials provide a set of tools for managing authorization and compliance requirements on the XRP Ledger, while respecting privacy and decentralization”—a framing that makes the feature legible to regulated actors who need attestations without building proprietary allow-lists.
Functionally, the amendment introduces new protocol-level objects and transactions so attestations can be issued, accepted, referenced and revoked on-chain. The XRPL’s Known Amendments registry enumerates the changes: three new transactions—CredentialCreate (issuer provisions a credential), CredentialAccept (subject validates it), and CredentialDelete (revocation/cleanup)—plus a new Credential ledger entry type. It also extends the existing DepositPreauth feature so deposit authorization can be expressed in terms of credential requirements, and adds a CredentialIDs field to several transactions (including Payment, EscrowFinish, PaymentChannelClaim, and AccountDelete) so a sender can present a set of credentials when interacting with a destination that enforces compliance gates.
Crucially, the concept docs emphasize that personal documents never touch the blockchain. In a canonical flow, a business that must restrict interactions to KYC’d accounts names trusted issuers off-chain; the issuer verifies the user privately and then writes only a signed credential to the ledger. “The documents that [the user] sends… are never published or stored on the blockchain,” yet multiple counterparties can rely on the same credential, avoiding redundant verification. That balance—on-chain attestations, off-chain evidence—mirrors the W3C Verifiable Credentials model while keeping attestations portable across the XRPL’s features.
Technically, the change is conservative but far-reaching. Because CredentialIDs can now ride alongside standard Payment semantics, an institution can—at the protocol layer—only accept deposits when the presented set of credential hashes matches a policy it has configured via DepositPreauth. That enforcement happens without bespoke middleware and is recorded in transaction metadata, improving auditability for regulated entities.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.82.
