XRP Ledger retries upgrade that lets banks split payment and compliance duties
The upgrade could activate Oct. 5, letting businesses give another account limited powers such as making payments or approving customers without handing over full control.
An XRP Ledger account could soon let another account make payments or approve customers on its behalf without handing over the keys that control everything else.
The feature, called PermissionDelegationV1_1, entered a 14-day activation countdown on Sept. 21 after 29 of the network’s 35 trusted validators backed it. It could go live on Oct. 5 at 11:18 UTC if support remains at or above 80% throughout the period, according to the live amendment dashboard.
The upgrade could make the XRP Ledger more appealing as decentralized layer 1 infrastructure for institutional payments by allowing stablecoin issuers, custodians and other businesses to separate routine operations from the keys that secure their accounts. That would let compliance and payment systems perform narrowly defined tasks without giving them broad authority over an issuer’s assets.
Traditional banks function that way ,separating payment, compliance and other operational duties internally, with different teams or systems handling each function.
At least 28 validators must continue supporting it. Any drop below that level resets the clock.
The upgrade lets an account divide its authority by job. A stablecoin issuer could allow an internet-connected compliance system to approve customer accounts to hold its token while keeping the keys with full control offline.
A separate operations account could receive permission to make payments without gaining the power to change those keys or grant authority to somebody else. Each delegate can receive up to 10 permissions, which the main account can later change or revoke, according to XRPL documentation.
PermissionDelegationV1_1 is the network’s second attempt at introducing the feature.
The original version contained a flaw that could let an attacker make another account pay fees for transactions it had not properly signed. Repeated submissions carrying deliberately high fees could have drained the victim’s XRP balance.
The software checked whether an account had permission to carry out the transaction before verifying its signature. Certain failures still charged a fee, meaning the money could be deducted before the system discovered that the signature was invalid, according to an XRPL vulnerability report.
A community tester reported the flaw on Sept. 15, 2025, while testing the feature outside the main network. Validators were advised to reject the amendment, and it never activated.