The XRP Ledger activated a new feature on Oct. 8 that allows account owners to authorize other accounts to carry out specific tasks without handing over the primary keys that control their funds.

The upgrade, known as PermissionDelegationV1_1, went live late Thursday, according to the monitoring site XRPL Dashboard. It enables businesses to enforce a division between functions such as payments and compliance, although each delegated account is restricted by action type rather than by a spending cap.

Under XRP Ledger rules, amendments require more than 80% support from trusted validators — the operators who confirm transactions — sustained two consecutive weeks. With the current validator list at 35, that threshold translates to at least 29 supporters. The delegation proposal's countdown reset in September after support slipped below that level, as CoinDesk reported.

Splitting authority by job

Businesses that process routine crypto transactions need signing keys available throughout the day, but keeping keys with broad powers on an internet-connected computer increases the potential damage if a hacker compromises that machine. Delegation addresses the problem by dividing authority by job function, so a compromised helper exposes only its assigned duties rather than the owner's full control over the funds.

A stablecoin issuer, for example, can allow a separate compliance account to approve new customers while keeping its main keys offline. The helper signs with its own keys and can perform only the actions it has been granted, and the owner can change or withdraw those permissions at any time. Each helper account can hold up to 10 permissions, which limit the kinds of actions it can take rather than automatically imposing a spending cap.

Banks already separate payment and compliance duties among staff. The upgrade gives businesses a way to make those divisions enforceable on the ledger itself.

The network held an average of $3.72 billion in tokenized assets and $539 million in Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin during the second quarter, according to a report shared with CoinDesk by Evernorth, an XRP treasury company. Together, those balances amounted to about $4.26 billion. Day-to-day movement of holdings at that scale rests on routine transaction signing — precisely the workload where the new delegation controls apply.

PaymentBurn warning

Official guidance tells users not to delegate the PaymentBurn permission, which is intended to let a helper destroy tokens, until a separate fix activates. Under certain conditions, that permission also allows the helper to create new tokens. The warning concerns tokens issued on the ledger rather than newly minted XRP, and other granular permissions are unaffected.

Validator-count bug under review

Developers are also examining a bug in how some XRP Ledger servers keep score during amendment votes. A report filed on Oct. 8 found that some servers can drop a validator from their count after it rotates a routine security key, even though the validator remains online and voting.

A server that loses track of two validators would measure support against 33 instead of 35, which can make a proposal look closer to passing on that server's count than it really is. A proposed patch would have servers identify validators by a permanent identifier instead, and it remains under review (issue, pull request).

As of Friday, the fix for the PaymentBurn issue had 27 of 35 validator votes. It needs 29 to begin the two-week countdown that would lift the warning. Whether that fix clears the threshold and how the validator-count patch review concludes — are the near-term items to watch as the ledger's new delegation controls settle in.

Source: CoinDesk