Schwartz will attend " Building What's Next for XRPL " in New York on October 28th at 4:30 PM (Eastern Time) alongside RippleX, the Senior Engineering Director, Ayo Akinyele. Ripple indicates that this discussion will focus on privacy, scalability, and institutional-level infrastructure, as XRPL gradually moves beyond its initial payment-focused role.
The timing is noteworthy. XRPL has entered one of the busiest upgrade periods of 2026, with new protocol features including atomic transactions, delegated account permissions, confidential transfers, and institutional lending.
Privacy is entering the XRPL protocol.
One of the most clear themes is the confidentiality of finance.
The XRPL version 3.3.0 introduced the ConfidentialTransfer amendment, which aims to use zero-knowledge proofs and EC-ElGamal encryption to hide the balances and transfer amounts of multi-purpose tokens. Authorized parties can still verify the supply and fulfill regulatory obligations, allowing institutions to obtain privacy protection without completely sacrificing audibility.
This is directly related to the recent direction Ripple has been promoting regarding privacy. Ripple believes that before banks move sensitive financial activities onto the blockchain, public blockchains need to have the capability for selective confidentiality.
Akinyele is particularly relevant to this effort: Ripple describes him as a cryptographer who focuses on privacy, scalability, and institutional infrastructure.
AI agents may become XRPL users
AI is also becoming an increasingly concrete part of the roadmap.
Ripple launched XRPL AI Starter Kit in June, which includes X402 payments that utilize XRP and RLUSD. This system is designed to enable autonomous agents to pay for API, computing resources, and other digital services without the need for human approval for each individual transaction.
This brings a completely different potential payment market to XRP: payments from software to software.
XRPL is becoming more programmable
The network is also adding infrastructure to support more complex financial workflows.
The latest XRPL upgrade includes BatchV1_1, which allows up to eight transactions to be combined into one batch; as well as PermissionDelegationV1_1, which enables accounts to grant limited permissions without sharing the master key.
Institutional-level DeFi is also expanding accordingly. The roadmap for Ripple combines Permissioned Domains, credentials, lending, and secure transfers to support regulated on-chain markets.
Coinpaper also reported on the advancement of lending within this network, which will directly bring the protocol’s native credit to XRPL.
