One of the XRP Ledger’s biggest weaknesses as a DeFi site could be on the verge of disappearing.
A draft amendment titled “AMM Swapable Curves” was filed in the XRPL standards repository on Tuesday, proposing to expand the network’s existing automated market maker with three types of pluggable curves: Constant Commodity, Concentrated Liquidity, and StableSwap.
A fourth, fully programmable curve type called Smart AMM is reserved for tracking specification. AMMs refer to automated market makers, a type of decentralized exchange where transactions take place against a pool of deposited tokens rather than between buyers and sellers.
The proposal was authored by XRL lead developers Denis Angell and Roman Thpt, and would require a separate amendment vote before activation. For the moment, it is still in planning.
This would allow XRPL liquidity providers to choose how their pool values assets. The current setup spreads liquidity evenly across all possible prices, which is suitable for volatile pairs but burns capital for stablecoin pairs and correlated assets.
Concentrated liquidity allows liquidity providers (or users who provide their tokens to a protocol in exchange for capturing a share of fees) to target a narrow band where most transactions actually take place, producing much more usable depth per dollar deposited. StableSwap is designed for assets that trade at a ratio close to 1:1, such as dollar-pegged stablecoins or wrapped representations of the same asset.
XRPL has been quietly building institutional tokenization volume – over $3 billion in real-world tokenized assets are currently on-chain, including a Ripple-JPMorgan pilot earlier this month processing a tokenized buyout from the US Treasury in less than five seconds.
But on-chain institutional capital transfer is an element of any financial strategy. Letting this capital earn a return, be borrowed, or trade efficiently against other tokenized assets requires DeFi rails that actually work for the task.
Concentrated liquidity, in particular, has become the norm for capital-efficient AMMs across major DeFi ecosystems, with around 60% of AMM volume now operating through some version of it, according to the proposal’s own data citations. XRPL’s current AMM has been gone since its launch in 2024.
The amendment also keeps existing pools intact. Pools created before the new curves were enabled remain on the constant product model with no migration required. Pool creators choosing from the new menu would do so at creation time, with the curve type locked for the life of the pool.
XRP was trading at $1.34 on Tuesday morning in the United States. Whether the AMM upgrade arrives in time to complete the institutional narrative depends on the amendment process, which can extend over months and whose adoption is not guaranteed.
