Ripple CTO David Schwartz has confirmed that serious internal discussions are underway regarding a potential modular refactor of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), with Rust emerging as a favored programming language for future implementations. The shift, if undertaken, could mark the most substantial architectural evolution in XRPL’s history—though Schwartz emphasized that nothing would change for users or the state of on-chain data.
“You could actually specify, yeah, actually you have to do like Z minus Q plus T minus R,” he said. “That would be annoying. We would probably want to re-specify and have an amendment where at one time we switch over to a more organized, clear, coherent version of that code.”
Rather than a full rewrite, Schwartz suggested a phased and modular strategy. The approach would begin with a formal specification of existing components like the payment engine and transaction logic, followed by compartmentalization of those components into virtual machines. “Even if we can’t do that [specify perfectly], we could isolate the pieces of code that have those annoying quirks… and maybe modularize them into a VM,” he said.
Some of the proposals under review were reportedly submitted by third-party companies, indicating external involvement in shaping the future structure of XRPL. “We’re making decisions now about what we think is worth doing and what the order of doing things would be,” Schwartz revealed.
The move also sparked community conversations around development standards and naming conventions within XRPL’s codebase. Developers like @xrp_hodl_r noted the inconsistency of naming conventions in API outputs and suggested standardization could reduce long-term maintenance costs. Vadari responded by emphasizing the importance of preserving backward compatibility and clarity for developers, explaining that canonical on-chain fields use different formats from synthetic ones for important technical reasons. “API versioning is already the mechanism we have for that, we really don’t need anything else,” she said.
While no decisions have been finalized, Schwartz made one thing clear: the conversation is no longer hypothetical. “It’s just not easy at all,” he said, “but it would be a win all around.”
At press time, XRP traded at $3.00.
