Ripple is clarifying the reason for its opposition to an XRP Ledger amendment that’s seen significant support from the asset’s community of validators.
Last week, the “checks” amendment crossed the necessary 80% support threshold among validators. If checks stays above that threshold until June 17th, it will be activated on the XRPL.
The upgrade will allow senders to sign transactions and create virtual checks for specific amounts and destinations. The XRP will not move until receivers decide to “cash” them. If the checks fail – due to potential sender issues like insufficient balance or liquidity – they will remain in the ledger so they can be cashed later.
Validator analytics platforms noted that Ripple held six out of the seven outstanding “nays” for the amendment.
When questioned about the lack of support, David Schwartz, chief technical officer at Ripple, said the potential costs of the amendment seem to outweigh its limited demand.
“Any change to a public ledger system has costs associated with it to everyone who uses that system. At an absolute minimum, they have to ensure the change doesn’t break any behavior that they’re relying on. So the bar for accepting a change should be pretty high.
We haven’t seen all that much demand for this feature. So we never were quite convinced the benefits exceeded that basic ‘cost of any change in behavior’.
But others could certainly disagree. If we opposed it for any significant reason, we’d certainly say so!”
