XRP Chain Upgrade: This Proposal Could Shift Demand

The debate centers on Sponsored Fees and Reserves, known as XLS-68, included among proposed amendments released with XRP Ledger software version 3.3.0. The change is not live, Stevenson stressed. It would need support from more than 80% of trusted validators for two consecutive weeks before activation, and the process has no fixed deadline.

Under the proposal, a business or application could cover a user’s XRP transaction fees and account reserves. The user would retain control of their keys and account, but could begin using an XRP Ledger-based service without first buying XRP.

That is the key point critics are making: a new user would no longer be forced to acquire XRP merely to open an account or hold issued assets. Kamilah Stevenson said that source of retail demand could indeed decline, describing it as “one kind of visible demand” that the amendment removes.

Yet she argued the reserve obligation remains. It is simply transferred to the sponsoring entity. On the ledger, she said, an account requires a 1 XRP base reserve, while each additional account object, including a trust line for an issued asset, requires 0.2 XRP.

An account holding two issued assets would therefore require 1.4 XRP in reserves. At scale, Dr. Stevenson calculated, 100,000 such customers would require 140,000 XRP; one million customers would require 1.4 million XRP; and 10 million customers would require 14 million XRP.

The crucial distinction is that reserve XRP is locked rather than consumed. It can be released when accounts or ledger objects are deleted, making it more like a treasury float or deposit than an operating expense.

Transaction fees are far smaller. With the base fee at 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP, one million transactions would burn roughly 10 XRP, according to the video. That leaves reserves—not fees—as the potentially meaningful balance-sheet consideration for businesses building on the network.

Dr. Stevenson also pointed to the amendment process as evidence of caution. She said earlier versions of Batch and Permission Delegation were withdrawn after security issues were identified, then revised and resubmitted rather than activated.

In a nutshell, XLS-68 represents a trade-off rather than a simple bullish or bearish event.

It could reduce small, individual XRP purchases at on-boarding while making XRPL applications easier to deploy at scale.

Whether increased business adoption ultimately creates more locked XRP than the network loses in retail friction remains, as Dr. Stevenson put it, “a genuinely open question.”

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