An XRP Ledger fix that stops some delegated accounts from minting new tokens will not switch on this week. Its validator support fell below the required level on Wednesday afternoon, restarting a two-week countdown that was due to end on Friday, 23 October.
The XRP Ledger changes its rules through amendments, upgrades that take effect only after more than 80% of trusted validators, the servers that agree on each new ledger, back them continuously for two weeks, according to XRPL.org.
The fix, called fixCleanup3_4_0, now shows a majority dating from 14:46:22 UTC on 21 October, according to the amendment record on a public XRP Ledger server read by CryptoWatchDesk at 09:50 UTC on Thursday. If support holds, it can activate from about 14:46 UTC on 4 November.
On 9 October, the same record showed a majority from 09:34 UTC that day, which is why the fix first gained a majority on 9 Oct pointed to 23 October.
Support dropped to 26 of 35 validators at a 12:54 UTC check on Wednesday, below the 29 needed, CoinDesk reported, citing the XRPL Dashboard tracker. It was back at 29 by 14:46 UTC.
XRPSCAN, another tracker, showed 28 votes in favour on Thursday morning against a threshold of 25 among the 32 validators it counted. Trackers differ because each one counts the validators its own server can see.
For operators, the practical point is unchanged, only longer. XRPL.org’s documentation recommends not delegating the PaymentBurn permission until the fix is enabled, because before it a delegate with that permission “can also mint new fungible tokens” in certain circumstances.
Why it matters: amendment clocks are the XRP Ledger’s main safety brake, and they cut both ways. A brief loss of support, for any reason, costs a fix two more weeks in production.
A rule with no partial credit
The vote is checked at regular flag ledgers, and a validator that is offline or restarting at that moment counts the same as one voting no. Neither tracker shows which validators dropped out on Wednesday.
The same thing happened to the delegation feature itself in September, when its clock restarted before it went live on 8 October.
Wednesday’s dip came on the afternoon some ledgers closed far more slowly than usual, as CryptoWatchDesk reported on slow ledger closes on Tuesday and Wednesday. We have seen no statement linking the two. The point release that XRP Ledger Operations said was in testing had not been published on GitHub by 09:55 UTC on Thursday; the latest is 3.4.1, which the overflow bug patched in xrpld 3.4.1 covered.
The fix sits in front of a larger queue. The amendment for the ledger’s native lending protocol, LendingProtocol, had 17 votes on XRPSCAN against the 25 needed, and has not started its own clock.
XRP was down 2.4% over 24 hours at $1.33 as of 09:55 UTC, according to CoinGecko. The next date to watch is 4 November, the earliest the fix can activate if support holds.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.