XRPL could close its biggest DeFi gap if new AMM amendment passes

One of the XRP Ledger's biggest weaknesses as a DeFi venue might be on its way out.

A draft amendment titled "AMM Swappable Curves" was filed on the XRPL standards repository Tuesday, proposing to extend the network's existing automated market maker with three pluggable curve types — constant product, concentrated liquidity, and StableSwap.

A fourth, fully programmable curve type called Smart AMM is reserved for a follow-up specification. AMMs refer to automated market makers, a type of decentralized exchange where trades happen against a pool of deposited tokens rather than between buyers and sellers.

The proposal was authored by XRL core developers Denis Angell and Roman Thpt and would require a separate amendment vote before activation. For now it is still in draft.

What it would do is let liquidity providers on the XRPL choose how their pool prices assets. The current setup spreads liquidity uniformly across every possible price, which is fine for volatile pairs but burns capital for stablecoin pairs and correlated assets.

Concentrated liquidity lets liquidity providers (or users that supply their tokens to a protocol in exchange of capturing a share of fees) target a narrow band where most trades actually happen, which produces far more usable depth per dollar deposited. StableSwap is built for assets that trade near 1:1, like dollar-pegged stablecoins or wrapped representations of the same asset.

The XRPL has been quietly building institutional tokenization volume — over $3 billion in tokenized real-world assets currently sit onchain, including a Ripple-JPMorgan pilot earlier this month processing a tokenized U.S. Treasury redemption in under five seconds.

But moving institutional capital onchain is one leg of any financial strategy. Letting that capital earn yield, get borrowed against, or trade efficiently against other tokenized assets requires DeFi rails that actually work for the task.

Concentrated liquidity in particular has become the standard for capital-efficient AMMs across major DeFi ecosystems, with around 60% of AMM volume now running through some version of it, per the proposal's own data citations. XRPL's current AMM has been missing that since launch in 2024.

The amendment also keeps existing pools untouched. Pools created before the new curves activate stay on the constant product model with no migration required. Pool creators picking from the new menu would do so at creation time, with the curve type locked in for the life of the pool.

XRP traded at $1.34 in U.S. morning hours Tuesday. Whether the AMM upgrade lands in time to compound the institutional narrative depends on the amendment process, which can stretch for months and is not guaranteed to pass.