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XRP Ledger operators are staring down a familiar kind of deadline drama on Thursday, after one community tracker warned that a large chunk of XRPL servers are about to get amendment blocked, basically pushed to the sidelines until they upgrade.
In about ~10 hours 418 (!!) out of 999 XRPL servers will go DOWN as they become amendment blocked! wrote X user Krippenreiter, adding that amendment-blocked rippled servers cant determine the validity of a ledger, submit transactions, process transactions, or participate in the consensus process.
That sounds catastrophic if youve never watched XRPL governance do its thing. But the important nuance is right there in the name: amendment blocking is a safety feature, not a network failure mode. When new protocol rules activate, old software cant reliably interpret ledgers anymore, so the network forces those servers into a non-participating state rather than letting them guess.
So does almost half the servers going amendment-blocked matter if activity spikes? Not at all, Krippenreiter replied to one user. All dUNL validators are safe, so all trusted validators will continue to validate as expected. (and behave under load) For everything else there is FeeEscalation. The point hes making: consensus comes from a trusted validator set, and fee escalation is designed to push transaction costs higher as the ledger gets busy, throttling spam and overload attempts.
Other XRPL watchers mostly treated it as routine maintenance, not an existential moment. Is this unusual or dangerous? No. This happens almost every amendment cycle, another user wrote, listing prior change windows and noting that lagging nodes typically upgrade later. The XRPL amendment process itself is built around a long lead time: an amendment needs sustained supermajority support from trusted validators for two weeks before it flips on.
Still, the optics arent nothing. Having hundreds of public servers fall behind at once can be a real-world nuisance for wallets, explorers, and businesses that lean on third-party infrastructure. Even if consensus is fine, fewer up-to-date nodes can mean less redundancy at the edges more brittle public endpoints, more support tickets, more why is my transaction not going through? posts.
And there is a concrete upgrade path. XRPL.orgs release notes for rippled 2.6.2 describe a new fixDirectoryLimit amendment plus a critical bug fix the kind of stuff you dont want to procrastinate on if you run production infrastructure.
The short version: no, XRPL isnt going down. But if youre still running old rippled in late 2025, the network is about to remind you that upgrades arent optional.
At press time, XRP traded alongside the broader market wide sentiment, down -1.5% over the past 24 hours.