Schwartz will join Ayo Akinyele, Senior Director of Engineering at RippleX, on October 28 at 4:30 PM Eastern Time in New York for “Building What’s Next for XRPL.” Ripple states that the discussion will focus on privacy, scalability, and institutional-grade infrastructure as XRPL evolves beyond its original payment-focused purpose.
The timing is significant. XRPL has entered one of its busiest upgrade periods for 2026, with new protocol features including atomic swaps, delegated account permissions, confidential transfers, and institutional lending.
Privacy is coming to the XRPL protocol.
One of the clearest themes is confidential finance.
Version 3.3.0 of XRPL introduces the ConfidentialTransfer amendment, which leverages zero-knowledge proofs and EC-ElGamal encryption to conceal multi-asset token balances and transfer amounts. Authorized parties can still verify supply and comply with regulatory obligations, enabling institutions to achieve privacy without fully sacrificing auditability.
This directly relates to Ripple’s recent push toward privacy. Ripple believes that public blockchains need selective confidentiality capabilities before banks can place sensitive financial activities on-chain.
Akinyele is particularly relevant to this effort: Ripple describes him as a cryptographer focused on privacy, scalability, and institutional infrastructure.
AI agents may become XRPL users
AI is also becoming an increasingly specific part of the roadmap.
In June, Ripple launched the XRPL AI Starter Kit, which includes X402 payments using XRP and RLUSD. The system is designed to enable autonomous agents to pay for APIs, computing resources, and other digital services without requiring human approval for each individual transaction.
This opens up a distinctly different potential payment market for XRP: software-to-software payments.
XRPL is becoming more programmable.
The network is also building infrastructure to support more complex financial workflows.
The latest XRPL upgrade includes BatchV1_1, which allows up to eight transactions to be grouped into a single batch; and PermissionDelegationV1_1, which enables accounts to grant limited permissions without sharing their master key.
Institutional DeFi is also expanding accordingly. Ripple’s roadmap integrates Permissioned Domains, credentials, lending, and confidential transfers to support regulated on-chain markets.
Coinpaper also reported on the network's lending advancement, which will bring native credit directly to the XRPL.