A Single XRP Ledger Proposal Just Put The Entire DeFi World On Notice — Here’s Why

A new amendment proposal submitted to the XRP Ledger Foundation’s repository on May 26 would fundamentally redesign how liquidity pools function on the XRP Ledger — introducing multiple curve types, concentrated liquidity, and a future fully programmable AMM architecture that mirrors the most advanced decentralized exchange infrastructure currently operating on Ethereum.

The proposal, titled AMM Swappable Curves and designated XLS Discussion #547, was submitted by Denis Angell (@dangell7) and Roman Thpt (@RomThpt) — both active contributors to the XRPL codebase — and is currently in draft status awaiting community review, per the GitHub discussion thread. It builds directly on XLS-30, the amendment that introduced XRPL’s original automated market maker in 2024.

The Problem The Proposal Solves

The current XRP Ledger AMM operates on a single invariant: the constant product formula — the same model used by Uniswap v2, where liquidity is spread uniformly across all price ranges. The proposal identifies three structural gaps that limit the current system’s competitiveness.

The first is capital inefficiency. Spreading liquidity uniformly means that only a small fraction is ever active near the current market price — making it less attractive for liquidity providers than concentrated alternatives. The second is curve inflexibility. Volatile trading pairs benefit from constant product pools. Stablecoin pairs benefit from StableSwap curves, which minimize slippage between closely correlated assets. Long-tail or asymmetrically weighted pairs benefit from Balancer-style weighting.

Forcing all pairs into one model is a structural disadvantage, per the proposal. The third is composability. The XRPL payment engine already routes across AMM pools and its native order book — adding curve diversity multiplies available liquidity sources without requiring changes to existing pathfinding logic.

The proposal introduces a pluggable curve architecture — pool creators select their preferred curve type at creation time from an initial set of three. Curve 0 is the existing constant product model, preserving full backward compatibility with all existing XLS-30 pools. Curve 1 is Concentrated Liquidity — equivalent to Uniswap v3 — allowing liquidity providers to target specific price ranges for dramatically greater capital efficiency. Curve 2 is StableSwap — equivalent to Curve Finance v1 — optimized for stablecoin and correlated asset pairs where minimal slippage matters most, per the proposal’s specification.

A fourth curve type — Smart AMM — is reserved for a forthcoming companion specification. It would allow pool creators to deploy WebAssembly binaries providing fully custom swap mathematics, dynamic fees, and lifecycle hooks including before and after swap, deposit, and withdrawal events. The architecture intentionally mirrors the host ABI and sandbox model already being developed for XLS-100 Smart Escrows — meaning the WASM runtime infrastructure is being built once and reused across multiple XRPL features, per the proposal.

Multiple pools per token pair — one for each curve type — would operate simultaneously without affecting existing pools. The XRPL’s payment engine would route across all of them automatically, selecting the optimal liquidity source for each transaction without any changes required from end users or existing integrations, per the technical specification.

This development marks a pivotal moment for the XRP Ledger’s DeFi infrastructure. A protocol that already hosts over $2 billion in tokenized real-world assets and processes $1.93 billion in monthly stablecoin transfers gaining Uniswap v3-grade concentrated liquidity and Curve Finance-style stable pools would represent a meaningful step toward institutional-grade on-chain liquidity — exactly the infrastructure that the asset managers, banks, and stablecoin issuers currently building on XRPL will eventually require.

Cover image from Grok, XRPUSD chart from Tradingview