XRP Ledger draft proposal eyes a major DEFI upgrade

A New Set of Curves for the XRPL AMM

The XRP Ledger Foundation (@XRPLF) published a new draft standard on May 26 that would significantly upgrade the network's automated market maker. The proposal appears in XRPL Standards discussion #547 under the title "AMM Swappable Curves" and is currently marked as a draft amendment proposal. The document lists Denis Angell and Roman Thpt as authors and identifies XLS-30, XRPL's existing AMM standard, as a required dependency.

The draft amendment would upgrade the XRP Ledger's automated market maker by adding three new curve types: constant product, concentrated liquidity, and StableSwap, with a programmable Smart AMM to follow. XRPL's current AMM design uses a constant-product model, similar to the structure used by early decentralized exchanges, functioning as a geometric mean AMM with a 0.5 weight parameter.

Concentrated liquidity pools, inspired by Uniswap v3, allow liquidity providers to place funds within selected price ranges rather than across the full market range, improving capital use when trading stays inside active price bands. StableSwap pools are designed for assets that trade closely together, such as stablecoins, tokenized cash products, FX pairs, and certain real-world asset markets, providing smoother pricing and lower slippage when assets have similar values. A companion Smart AMM specification extending this architecture with fully programmable WebAssembly-based pools is to be defined in a forthcoming companion specification.

The draft is designed to preserve compatibility with existing XRPL AMM pools. Current pools would default to CurveType 0, meaning they would continue operating under the existing constant-product model. For new pools, the selected curve type would become part of the AMM pool key, allowing multiple pools for the same asset pair to exist under different curve models. The XRPL payment engine already routes across AMM pools and the order book, and adding curve diversity multiplies liquidity sources without changes to pathfinding.

Why the Timing Matters for XRPL

The proposal comes as more than $3 billion in tokenized real-world assets, including a recent Ripple-JPMorgan pilot, sit on XRPL. Stablecoin 30-day transfer volume on the ledger has reached $1.93 billion, up 9.92%. The proposal arrives as XRPL continues to position itself around institutional DeFi, stablecoins, and tokenized assets, with Ripple previously highlighting XRPL's AMM infrastructure as part of its support for regulated tokens such as RLUSD.

Moving institutional capital on-chain is one leg of any financial strategy. Letting that capital earn yield, get borrowed against, or trade efficiently against other tokenized assets requires DeFi infrastructure that actually works for the task. The draft proposal is currently in the community feedback stage, and XRPL developers and validators will need to review and approve the technical specifications before any code is integrated into the ledger.

Sources:
XRPL Standards Discussion #547: AMM Swappable Curves (GitHub)
CoinDesk: XRPL Could Close Its Biggest DeFi Gap If New AMM Amendment Passes
Crypto Times: XRP Ledger Foundation Publishes AMM v2 Standard for XRPL DEX