Five more votes and XRP holders can borrow onchain

Five Validator Votes Between XRP Holders and Native RLUSD Borrowing

@FlareNetworks co-founder Hugo Philion (@HugoPhilion) has outlined a plan that would let $XRP holders borrow RLUSD directly on the XRP Ledger, without moving assets to another chain. The mechanism relies on Flare smart accounts and the Wormhole bridge for RLUSD. Philion proposed using Flare's smart account technology so that RLUSD would be delivered on the XRP Ledger itself, rather than requiring users to move assets to other blockchains or exchanges. For this feature to become a reality, the Wormhole bridge for RLUSD must be activated, and this process depends on validators approving the Permission Delegation amendment.

That amendment is now within striking distance. The amendment vote commenced with the launch of XRP Ledger's version 3.3.0 on August 12, 2026. Support has since climbed to 24 of the 35 trusted validators, five short of the 29 needed to trigger the two-week activation countdown. The amendment will require at least 29 affirmative votes, representing over 80% validator approval, maintained over a two-week window for activation.

A Rocky Road: Why the Amendment Was Pulled Once Before

The road to this vote has not been straightforward. An earlier version of the Permission Delegation amendment was withdrawn in 2025 after a serious flaw was discovered. Permission Delegation exposed a path to loss: an invalid offline-signed transaction could still charge a victim account a transaction fee before failing authorization, allowing repeated submissions to drain $XRP through fees. The XRPL's disclosure confirmed the feature never activated on mainnet, and validators disabled support for the affected amendment.

The replacement, PermissionDelegationV1_1, underwent a thorough independent review before returning to the vote. Permission Delegation passed an independent security review by Cantina and the XRPL quality assurance test suite, with all findings fixed in v1.1 and verified by Cantina, and the QA team found no regressions across 5,088 tests.

Meanwhile, Flare has already taken a first step toward putting $XRP to work in DeFi. Flare's FXRP token has been approved as collateral in an institutionally curated Morpho vault on Ethereum, letting XRP holders borrow Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin without selling, marking the first time an XRP-based asset has been accepted in a major on-chain lending market. Philion has described the longer-term ambition as removing that complexity entirely. Flare says it is building a route through Smart Accounts that would let holders authorize the whole sequence from an XRP Ledger wallet, with direct XRPL-to-Ethereum minting also in development.

With 24 of the 35 required validators already on board, the remaining five votes could unlock a native borrowing experience that keeps users entirely within the XRP Ledger ecosystem.

Sources:
Crypto News: XRP as DeFi collateral via Flare and Morpho
CoinDesk: Flare's wrapped XRP wins approval in $280 million RLUSD lending vault
CoinTurk: Flare co-founder pushes XRP Ledger for RLUSD borrowing