Ripple's director of engineering Viijay Khanna directly confirmed that the company is readying 'big plans' for XRP Ledger in 2027. The remark came amid the debates around the blockchain's speed, when critics put the XRP network's stats (around 1,500 transactions per second) against the average daily load of Visa, labeling the XRPL "an outdated copy of legacy payment systems".
"We have big plans for performance improvements lined up for 2027", said Khanna, effectively ending speculations.
Why TPS does not matter anymore
Ripple's engineering department is aiming to exit the race for beautiful numbers behind the TPS metric. The logic is that the basic Layer-1 does not need to digest millions of small transactions directly. Retail microtraffic then goes to the second layer like Dassie (Interledger). The task of the main layer thus becomes maintaining large funds of banks and institutions.
The first step to this kind of independence from "heavy blockchain metal" was made this month with the fresh release of xrpld 3.3.0 which cut the appetite of nodes to RAM by 13-23%.
Technical audits show that the issue was not in simple code flaws, but the caprices of the system's allocator: the software was literally withholding the server's resources after the cache emptying. Bug fix therefore allowed validators to radically decrease infrastructure costs.
For further improvement of the current operational environment on November 4, the network got a fixCleanup package.
Deep modernization of XRP Ledger
Khanna's short commentary is not an attempt to snuff out critics, but a marker of an ecosystem's overhaul for the needs of commercial banks. Ripple's president Monica Long has already announced a plan to relay the big chunk of the company's clients' payments directly on XRP Ledger. Cross-border remittances will be tied to new lending infrastructure as well.
To make sure the network will not flood from institutional funds, XRP Ledger Foundation already presented a 2027 roadmap with these as main highlights:
- 24 complex amendments worth $5.774 million will be shipped for development and audit of working demo-versions
- Plans for native smart contracts via WebAssembly (XLS-101), lending pools, options (XLS-62) and repo markets for interbank lending covered by tokenized assets
- Heavy demand for CPU just for pathfinding inside the native decentralized exchange
The overhaul of XRP Ledger is a preventive hit on the network's future overload. Ripple ecosystem builders rewrite the basis, using AI teams for strict testing and code optimization. XRP Ledger is being readied for the moment when transactions with RLUSD stablecoin, tokenized stocks trading, and interbank lending become a routine and not just pilot projects.
