Ripple engineers are exploring native XRP staking as the XRPL’s DeFi ecosystem lags with only $81.8M in Total Value Locked (TVL). Led by CTO David Schwartz, the proposal seeks options to introduce staking without altering the network’s core principles. The measure is part of a 2025 roadmap to turn the ledger into an institutional DeFi platform and attract specialized liquidity.
Designed in 2011 and launched in June 2012 by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto as a fast and efficient payments infrastructure, the XRPL uses consensus validated by independent nodes that enables settlements in 3–5 seconds.
However, its initial architecture prioritized payments over programmable contracts, which limited liquidity participation in DeFi and created what developers call “latent liquidity”.
The transaction fee burn model directly prevents an obvious source of staking rewards, raising the central question of where rewards would come from without violating the principle of fee burning. The most prominent technical proposal is a two-tier consensus model that would segregate governance and processing functions to preserve performance and stability, according to internal developer proposals.
2025 roadmap for Ripple
Ripple has allocated $500M to boost institutional adoption on XRPL in 2025, with concrete objectives: permissioned DEXs, credit-based lending protocols (such as the proposed XLS-66d) and tokenization of real-world assets (RWA).
Recent moves —the launch of the XSGD stablecoin on XRPL and integration via the Coreum bridge— aim to improve interoperability and create entry points for institutional flows.
The launch of an EVM-compatible sidechain scheduled for the second quarter of 2025 would allow deploying contracts and attract dApps and protocols already existing in the Ethereum ecosystem.
For traders and treasuries, the emergence of native staking would offer new sources of yield and liquidity management tools, but would also introduce operational and governance risks that must be evaluated, such as changes in circulating supply, reward design, and effects on decentralization.
The native staking proposal responds to the need to reactivate $81.8M of TVL and turn XRPL into a relevant player for institutional DeFi; its success will depend on the technical resolution of rewards and the rollout of the EVM sidechain planned for Q2 2025.
