The XRP Ledger community is debating whether an approaching v3.1.3 upgrade amounts to a hard fork after infrastructure operators warned that nodes failing to update before the fix amendment activates will no longer be able to communicate with the network.
The dispute erupted after XRPL validator operator Vet said version 3.1.3 of rippled had been available for more than a week, with 40% of the network upgraded at the time of his post (May 18). He warned that the fix amendment included in the release would become active in nine days and that “every node that hasn’t been updated to 3.1.3 will be unable to communicate to the network.”
In a later update, RippleX head of engineering J. Ayo Akinyele said 44% of the XRPL network had upgraded and urged node operators to move quickly, adding: “Only 8 days left before the fix amendment activates — don’t be left out!”
XRPL Hard Fork Debate Heats Up
According to XRPL.org, rippled is the reference server implementation of the XRP Ledger protocol. The 3.1.3 release introduces the fixCleanup3_1_3 amendment, a package of fixes for NFTs, Permissioned Domains, Vaults and the Lending Protocol. Because of the importance of those fixes, XRPL.org said the amendment’s default vote is set to “Yes.”
The “hard fork” framing came from critics who argued that, as of the early upgrade figures, a majority of network nodes were still on the path to being cut off. X user ScamDaddy wrote: “The XRPL will hard fork in 9 days. As of this moment, 60% of the network will be forked off.” The post then turned the argument into a governance challenge: “But who’s to say 3.1.3 should be XRP mainnet, Ripple? Vet? 60% is the majority after all!”
That framing drew pushback from XRPL community members who argued the mechanism is better understood as amendment blocking, not an accidental or contentious chain split. XRPL’s amendment system uses validator voting to approve protocol changes that affect transaction processing. According to XRPL.org, an amendment passes if it receives more than 80% support from trusted validators for two weeks, after which the change applies permanently to future ledger versions.
The technical consequence for outdated servers is still material. XRPL.org says amendment blocking is a security feature intended to protect data accuracy when old software no longer understands the active rules of the network. Servers running earlier versions without the amendment code cannot determine ledger validity, submit or process transactions, participate in consensus, or vote on future amendments; upgrading to a newer rippled version unblocks them.
Daniel Keller, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Eminence, a blockchain infrastructure company that runs a Full History Node for the XRP Ledger, argued that raw node counts may overstate the operational risk. “The only question is: how many of them actually matter to XRPL operations?” he wrote. “How many are abandoned? How many would just update a few hours late? How many are actually relevant infrastructure?”
Keller framed the cutoff as maintenance discipline rather than a decentralization failure: “Decentralisation does not mean dead weight gets carried. Running a node is a responsibility, not a participation trophy. If you can’t maintain infrastructure, you should get filtered out. That is network hygiene.”
Krippenreiter made a similar case, saying the negative connotation around “forking” can obscure XRPL’s design. “Forking has a negative connotation because it sounds like the network is less secure because of it, when in reality, at least on the XRP Ledger, the amendment block mechanism itself, ironically, is a security feature,” he wrote. “It is a security mechanism so that no transaction data or rules on XRPL are interpreted wrongly by any node that didn’t already update.”
At press time, XRP traded at $1.38.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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