Ripple's director of engineering, Viijay Khanna, has confirmed that the company is preparing "big plans" for the XRP Ledger in 2027. The statement came amid ongoing debate over the blockchain's speed, after critics set the XRP network's throughput of roughly 1,500 transactions per second — the throughput metric most commonly used to compare blockchains — against the average daily load handled by Visa and labeled the XRPL "an outdated copy of legacy payment systems."

"We have big plans for performance improvements lined up for 2027," Khanna said, effectively ending the speculation. The remarks were reported by U.Today.

Why TPS No Longer Matters

Ripple's engineering department is aiming to step out of the race for headline TPS numbers. The logic is that the base Layer-1 — the core chain that settles balances and maintains consensus — does not need to process millions of small transactions directly. Retail micropayment traffic is instead expected to move to second-layer solutions, protocols that handle transaction flow outside the base chain itself, such as Dassie (Interledger), built on the open Interledger protocol suite for connecting separate payment networks, while the main ledger's task becomes maintaining large funds for banks and institutions.

The first step toward this independence from "heavy blockchain metal" came this month with the release of xrpld 3.3.0 — the core server software that powers the ledger's validators — which cut nodes' RAM consumption by 13–23%. Technical audits showed the problem was not simple code flaws but the behavior of the system's allocator: the software was effectively withholding server resources after cache emptying. The bug fix allowed validators — the servers that confirm transactions through the ledger's consensus process — to substantially reduce infrastructure costs.

For further improvement of the current operating environment, the network received a fixCleanup package on November 4.

Deep Modernization of the XRP Ledger

Khanna's brief comment is not merely an attempt to quiet critics, but a marker of an ecosystem-wide overhaul built around the needs of commercial banks. Ripple President Monica Long has already announced a plan to route a large share of the company's clients' payments directly on the XRP Ledger, with cross-border remittances to be tied to new lending infrastructure as well.

To ensure the network is not flooded by institutional funds, the XRP Ledger Foundation has presented a 2027 roadmap whose main highlights include:

• 24 complex amendments worth $5.774 million, to be shipped for the development and audit of working demo versions
• Native smart contracts via WebAssembly (XLS-101), lending pools, options (XLS-62), and repo markets for interbank lending covered by tokenized assets
• Heavy CPU demand for pathfinding — the routing logic that searches the decentralized exchange for the best payment path — inside the native decentralized exchange

WebAssembly, the technology underpinning the smart-contract proposal, is a binary instruction format used across browsers and cloud platforms to run code at near-native speed, and the numbered XLS entries are formal submissions to the ledger's standards process. Under XRPL rules, an amendment reaches the live protocol only after a supermajority of validators votes to activate it, so the 2027 roadmap will advance as a sequence of publicly trackable consensus decisions rather than a single release.

The XRP Ledger overhaul is a preventive measure against future network overload. Ripple ecosystem builders are rewriting the ledger's foundations, using AI teams for rigorous testing and code optimization. The XRP Ledger is being prepared for the moment when transactions in RLUSD (Ripple's dollar-backed stablecoin), tokenized stock trading, and interbank lending become routine rather than pilot projects.