The XRP Ledger activated an upgrade on Thursday that lets an account owner delegate narrow tasks, such as approving customers or sending payments, to a helper account. The feature is called PermissionDelegationV1_1.
The XRP Ledger is a so-called layer-1 blockchain, a network with its own validators that is widely used for payments, stablecoins and tokenized assets. Upgrades there are called amendments, and they switch on only after enough trusted validators support them for two weeks.
The amendment went live in ledger 107,524,865, which closed at 21:29:50 UTC on 8 Oct, according to DeFi Prime. A public XRPL server showed it as enabled on Friday.
A helper can receive up to 10 permissions, CoinDesk reported. They limit the type of action, not the amount, so a delegated account is not given a spending cap.
The idea is to keep the main keys offline. A stablecoin issuer could let a compliance account approve new customers while the keys that control its holdings stay in cold storage.
This is the sort of separation of duties that banks run internally, and now it can be enforced on the ledger. It follows a wider push for issuer-level controls on public chains, such as Cardano’s programmable tokens.
The PaymentBurn warning
The ledger’s own documentation carries a caution. “Until the fixCleanup3_4_0 amendment is enabled, it is recommended not to delegate the PaymentBurn granular permission. Before the fix, a delegate with the PaymentBurn granular permission can also mint new fungible tokens (trust line tokens or MPTs) in certain circumstances,” XRPL.org says.
The warning concerns tokens issued on the ledger, not XRP itself, and other granular permissions are unaffected, according to the same page.
CoinDesk reported on Friday morning that the fix had 27 of 35 validator votes and needed 29. That has since changed. A public XRPL server’s amendment record showed the fix with a majority from 09:34 UTC on Friday.
If support holds for two weeks, the fix could activate on or after 23 Oct. That date is CryptoWatchDesk’s calculation from the two-week rule, not an announced schedule, and a drop in support would restart the clock, as happened to delegation in September.
CoinDesk also reported a separate bug report, filed on 8 Oct, saying some servers can drop a validator from their vote count after it rotates a routine security key. We have not seen a fix for that yet.
XRP was trading near $1.40 as of 09:50 UTC on Friday, up about 1.4% from the day’s open, according to Kraken. The next date to watch is 23 Oct, the earliest the PaymentBurn fix could switch on.
Related: Coin Levels on XRP
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.