XRPL Permission Delegation Roundtable

And I really didn't understand why that required like such a high burden of economic proof or whatever. So I just asked publicly. And then a lot of that happened, including XRP market reconsidering its vote, which I think it's amazing. So just today, the goal is to understand exactly what this feature does, why validators were hesitant, and what we can learn from how the process actually played out. So the first question actually would be around the process. This, what just happened is just like a normal process for this type of vote. Am I correct on this assessment bet? Can you repeat that, sorry? Yeah, so the question is about the process itself. Like in terms of the voting and all that, like this is a standard process that always takes place when there are amendments, right? Correct, yeah. Voting was never by the way, I think it shipped out of the gate on the XRP ledger, like in 2012 or 13. It was hard coded essentially. So people like David Schwarzen other is put, or Nicolás put like basically into the code, into an update. Say, hey, this feature gets activated in a future date and you write the date down, let's say December 1st, okay? 2026, it's going to get activated. And when we reach that time, the feature gets activated. Then people were figuring out this is not very flexible because if there's any issues, right? You need to pull your vote, maybe you need to delay the vote for whatever reason, the activation, sorry, of the amendment. You have no flexibility. Once you're right into the code, December 1st, it's December 1st. Unless you make another update, right? And people change it once again, okay? It's less dynamic. So along the way between 2012, 13 and 16, they figured out how we need to have more flexibility. So they introduced a voting system. The voting system on the extra privilege is for amendment activation coordination, right? Just like it was before, right? It's to coordinate when a feature gets activated, okay? That's sort of the idea, right? So you come together to people make a due diligence and you ultimately set a date and say, hey, I'm going to vote for it. And once there is a majority, there's consensus of that this feature is able to go into activation right after two weeks. So voting is a method essentially on the extra privilege to coordinate amendment activation. Why is that, by the way, very important? It has also something to do with the consensus algorithm of the extra privilege. The consensus algorithm of the extra privilege requires 80% quorum of a given list, or UNL in that case, on the extra PL. So you need 80% to agree on transaction ordering, okay? So to get to the next block, right? So you need 80%. So you need a quorum, so you need a group of people. The problem though is if you have not amendment coordination, you have no different protocol changes on the extra privilege and they would not be compatible. So if we don't do this, right, like the coordination, and I update to a new extra privilege version, and let's say permission delegation gets activated immediately without coordinating. So I update and it gets activated immediately. The big problem is, my node now cannot really communicate with your node anymore, because I have a different version, I see permission delegation, you don't see permission delegation. So when someone does a transaction with permission delegation, my validator includes it into the transaction ordering, yours does not. So that's a big problem with our consensus mechanism that we need a high degree of agreement here, okay? Because of the quorum. If you would have something like proof of work, or proof of stake, it would work, right? Because just one person can just chug along, right? And to transaction ordering. But because we need like multiple people, 80%, right? We need more people to agree on a given software version. That's why coordination is very, very important on the extra privilege, that's why we are voting. And so for our consensus mechanism, that's very crucial. Uh-huh, okay, so here I'm learning something new, which is like bottom line for people that are non-technical. Because of the consensus, you really need a better, or a stronger level of coordination, right? I'm on the people, because you need a high level of participation and all of that. And considering that, do you think, because this, correct me from wrong on this, this is like the second version, right? Like there was a vote on the first permission delegation and now we're kind of voting again. Is that what's happening? Yes, last year, in 2025, permission delegation already came up for voting, and it had an issue. And that issue caused, it was one of the major ones, actually, only batch top that, batch doubled down on it basically. But the original version of batch, was, sorry, of permission delegation, was allowing you to burn other people's XRP. You can imagine this is the terrible, this is a very bad bug, okay? That was a bug, so it was pulled, okay? And then it was reworked over, no, over a year to come back to the extra pre-ledger, right? With all the new tools and mechanisms we have, okay? So it's a reintroduced amendment. Only batch was topping it, and that the only difference to batch was, so permission delegation allowed people to burn, and batch was like, you know, hold my beer, and batch was the original version, was allowing you to send XRP around essentially. So not only burning, but I can also take it away, do other stuff with it, so that caused like this whole change of, yeah, the security we work we had. But it's a reintroduced amendment. It's a very old amendment too. If you go back and see like when it was proposed, we're talking about many, many years, okay? So this is not sort of a new amendment. Exactly. And because of that, you know, when I posted, like I said before the context, it was like, I was just asking the community because I found it strange having to put like so many extra information for something that looks like a no-brainer, at least from my side, right? Which again, I do have some context that might be limited, and you know, I'm glad that we're having this space to clarify everything. So do you think that, you know, what happened with Arthur because he was essentially arguing that you need to provide the financial information, like the economic reasons behind. And he also, I think he's sharing like a sort of template on how you should go about these type of things. Is there anything on your side that says, okay, yeah, you know, you know what, we really need to start, you know, adding more substance each time we do amendments and we go on the boat and all of that, or is it like just a particular situation here? So I wanna say that actually, I share his sentiment, right? I think how he went about it, I would not do the same way that he went about it. I think this is what we would differ. But just in principle, right, I think that's a good approach, right? So the idea is we want amendments who have a high degree of popularity so that people are essentially using them, right? We don't wanna introduce things to the excerpt or the nobodies using it, okay? You like, that's always a bad thing. Like you just don't wanna use it like a junkyard. So how, and you know, how to present that is of course up to anyone's individual, right? How they wanna present that? Some people say, hey, look on X, there's a bunch of things on YouTube, maybe there's information on Xopia.org. And he's a fan of a template specifically, some things in his assessment already, I would say covered in other parts like Ripple X is posting quality assurance and performance reports. That is covered because he has cost analysis also part of his assessment. But just in general to say, hey, let's put some numbers on, right? Like some potential, right, for this is a good thing, right? Like I think this is something we should have for amendments, which is essentially a pitch to the validators to say, look, with this amendment, this is the opportunity here, right? This is the opportunity we can get, this much potential in activity, this much in liquidity, this many users in terms of institutional partners or projects, to give us a rough estimate, I think nobody is really against it, that's a thing. It's just like, I guess how he went about it that this is a bit more controversial, that's his thing. But in principle, I agree, and I think this is something that should be part of it, because again, we need to make really sure that amendments will come to the Xopia ledger, we have a high degree of quote unquote certainty that it is not only safe, but also that we have the economics covered, that's the idea. Yeah, I actually fully agree with that. I think it was a little bit unfortunate, let's call it that way, how everything rolled up in terms of the public communication, but I do think it makes sense to have a format and to have rules, and I think the way you put it, like pitching to the validators, I think it's a good angle actually, because we don't want to waste anyone's time here, like this requires a lot of resources and time and effort, so you want to make sure things are done properly, so fully aligned there. And again, I think the outcome was very positive, including this space as well. And actually, I think we can at this stage, now we have a lot of people in the room, we can take a sort of step back and then discuss the basics of permission delegation and what actually is it, right? Like can you explain that as some five years old? Yeah, permission delegation, essentially, as the name sort of teases, is introducing delegation on the XRP ledger for accounts. So everybody knows most of the people here listening, they have probably an XRP account and they have full control over it, because they own the keys, right? So they have full control over everything that can be done with the account. Payments, they can mint an NFT, they can do dex trades, right? So they can do a bunch of things on the XRP ledger because they have like full control. Turns out, as an individual, that's amazing because you only depend on yourself. Now imagine a situation where you are a company, a large organization, a bank institution. So now we have many people who want to do, or had need access to this account, because they need to do different things, right? So I might do payments, the trading desk might need dex activity access, right? The compliance team needs something else, right? To check on credentials, permission, you know, there's like a bunch of features that people want to utilize. So now you have one account, one keys, well, it's still one key for the account. And you have multiple people who want to have access to it. You know, you can all tell us, it's not really from a security point of view, not really great. So now the logical answer to this is, well, multi-sick, right? Let's do multi-sick. Okay, so now you can have a multi-signer, whereas basically you have a threshold, where you say they out of five signers, you need at least three. Okay, so three out of five, for example. So you need like three people to sign a transaction out of the five keys available to make the transaction valid and be able to be validated. Okay, so now you have the multi-signer, but the problem is the multi-signer is still allowing everybody to do everything, right? So the three signers, three out of five, in that case, that in my example, are still able to perform all things, payments, decks, NFTs, permission domain, credentials, the ID, all right. And permission delegation says, let's do a different approach, or do something different, and to target like the actual problem is let's give rolls, okay, let's give a roll to each of those people, and let them only perform that. And go even a step further, let them use their own account, a different XRP account to do that. Okay, so what does it mean? Going back to the example of one account, right? This one account that we have as a bank here, or institution, this one, what you can now do is you can tell the compliance team, hey, you guys please create an XRP account, maybe even a multi-sign, right, to make it even better, make this the compliance XRP account, okay? So this is the now the compliance XRP account. And on the main account that we have, for let's say issuing assets or a stable coin as a bank or institution, on the main account, we give you delegation to perform only transactions that are relevant to you as a compliance team. For example, freezing funds, right? Like freezing funds is very important as an institution, if you're an asset issuer, specifically in the United States, you need to follow court orders, law, all that. So this team can now with their XRP account, freeze funds.