XLS: How New Features Get Proposed

How a new idea becomes a formal draft specification on the road to becoming an XRP Ledger amendment.

Before any new feature reaches the formal amendment voting process, it typically passes through an earlier, more open-ended design stage — the XLS (XRP Ledger Standard) process.

What an XLS document is

An XLS is a numbered draft specification — similar in spirit to Bitcoin's BIPs (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) or Ethereum's EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) — describing a proposed new feature, its motivation, its exact technical behavior, and its tradeoffs, published openly for community review and discussion before any code is necessarily finalized.

You'll see XLS numbers referenced throughout this wiki's Technology section: NFTs are formally specified as XLS-20, for example.

The typical lifecycle of an idea

1. Proposal. A developer or team drafts an XLS document describing the feature and opens it for public discussion.
2. Community and technical review. Other developers, validator operators, and interested community members critique the design — questioning edge cases, security implications, and interactions with existing features.
3. Reference implementation. A working implementation is built (often by the proposer, sometimes with help from Ripple's engineering team or independent contributors) so the feature can actually be tested, typically first on Devnet.
4. Amendment submission. Once the design has matured and been implemented, it's packaged as a formal amendment and shipped in a rippled release, starting the amendment voting clock described above.
5. Activation or abandonment. If validators reach and sustain the required supermajority, the amendment activates. If support never materializes, the proposal simply never activates — there's no forced timeline.

Why this two-stage process (XLS discussion, then amendment voting) matters

Separating "let's openly debate whether this is a good idea" from "let's formally vote to activate it on the live network" gives the ecosystem a lower-stakes space to catch design problems, gather feedback from a wide range of stakeholders, and iterate — before the higher-stakes, harder-to-reverse formal voting process begins.

Who can propose an XLS

Anyone. While many prominent XLS proposals have come from Ripple's own engineering team (reflecting the resources a well-funded company can dedicate to protocol research), the process itself is open — independent developers, academic researchers, and other ecosystem participants have proposed and driven XLS documents as well. This openness is part of what distinguishes the XRPL's governance model as multi-stakeholder rather than single-company-directed, echoing the broader theme covered in The XRP Ledger Foundation.

Where to find current proposals

Draft and historical XLS documents are maintained in the community's shared specification repository, which tracks the full history of proposed (accepted, rejected, and still-under-discussion) standards — the definitive, current source for exactly what's being worked on.