XRPL Native Bridge Faces Shutdown as Ripple Eyes 10,000+ Lines of Dead Code

Ripple has asked the XRP Ledger community to retire XLS-38, its long-pending native cross-chain bridge amendment.

RippleX engineer David Fuelling published the formal recommendation on August 27, 2026, citing low developer demand and the fact that Axelar already handles the primary use case.

The XLS-38 was never activated on mainnet. Ripple says withdrawing it would cut more than 10,000 lines from the xrpld codebase.

For investors, this is a protocol-housekeeping call, not a live-bridge failure.

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Why Ripple Is Recommending XLS-38 Be Withdrawn

The XLS-38 was designed to let assets move between XRPL mainnet and custom sidechains using a decentralized network of “witness servers.”

Its biggest intended role was bridging XRP to the XRPL EVM Sidechain as a native gas token. That plan changed in June 2024.

Ripple chose Axelar as the production bridge for XRPL–EVM interoperability, citing Axelar’s 75+ validators and experience spanning 55+ connected blockchains.

Ripple’s own UNL validator switched its vote to “No” on XLS-38 at that point.

That decision gave the community 12–15 months to prove private-sidechain demand for XLS-38.

That window is now closed. According to Fuelling’s post, only about 4–5 of the 35 UNL validators, roughly 11–14%, were voting “Yes.”

The threshold for activation is 80% support for 14 consecutive days. Demand never came close.
Mayukha Vadari, an XLS-38 co-author at RippleX, confirmed on X that the amendment never existed on any production network.

Axelar, she noted, has run the XRPL EVM bridge live for over a year. #

XLS-38 never went live and never existed on a production network, while Axelar has been humming along excellently for the EVM Sidechain for over a year. And @CommonPrefix has been doing great as stewards of Axelar after taking over from the founders.

— Mayukha Vadari (@msvadari) August 28, 2026

Meanwhile, Ripple’s engineering focus has shifted to live institutional-grade features.

XRPL 3.3.0 brought privacy enhancements and tokenization upgrades, and the team is actively advancing a lending protocol and single-asset vault on XRPL.

Carrying unused bridge code alongside that work creates maintenance costs with no return.

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What the XLS-38 Withdrawal Process Looks Like, and What Investors Should Watch

Ripple cannot remove XLS-38 on its own. The plan involves three stages. First, Ripple opens a pull request to mark XChainBridge as VoteBehavior, Obsolete in the xrpld repository.

Second, validators that upgrade then stop voting for the amendment automatically. Third, once no active validator supports it, the code is deleted entirely.

Ripple also left the door open. If any team presents an active build that specifically requires a native XLS-38 bridge, the company says it will revisit the recommendation.

So far, none has surfaced. For EVM Sidechain users, Fuelling’s post is clear, Axelar remains the path to and from XRPL mainnet, and nothing changes.

The investor read is constructive but narrow in scope. XLS-38 is not a live-liquidity event.

No mainnet assets are locked in the bridge. The real signals worth tracking are XRP ETF flows, ETF inflows recently hit their second-largest level of 2026, and institutional positioning.

Goldman Sachs returned as the largest XRP ETF holder, reinforcing the institutional bid beneath XRP even as protocol-level governance moves play out.

That institutional confidence is also being shaped by real-world payment utility.

Ripple’s partnership with a Korean bank to replace SWIFT with real-time payments illustrates the direction of Ripple’s strategy, payments and TradFi rails, not a homemade witness-bridge.

Dropping unused protocol weight is consistent with that posture.

On the governance criticism: some voices on X have called the move centralizing, Ripple voted No for two years, then asked the network to retire the native alternative.

That argument has merit as a debate point. But for holders, the test is practical. If no serious builder surfaces a real XLS-38 use case, the market should treat this as routine codebase hygiene.

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