Five open XRPL standards changes move the spec toward the code, not the other way round

Victoria Shinder25 September 2026, 08:551 min read

The open pull request list on the XRPL Standards repository reads, at the moment, like a single co-ordinated exercise. Three of the entries say it in their titles: sync the XLS-86 firewall specification with the reference implementation, sync the XLS-78 subscriptions spec with the reference implementation, and update XLS-65 vault failure conditions and state changes — with a second XLS-65 change covering VaultCreate.

The rest are the same movement at smaller scale. XLS-0085 aligns an MPT lock error code with the implementation, changing tecFROZEN to tecLOCKED. XLS-102 specifies the byte order of integers crossing the host boundary. XLS-66 clarifies the units of CoverRateMinimum in the LoanBrokerSet fields table. A further entry covers principal-only vault and loan-broker accounting under LendingProtocolV1_1.

What it means

The direction of travel is the story. A standards repository whose open work is mostly "make the document match what was built" is a repository whose specifications are trailing running code — and that is a normal, healthy phase for a protocol that has just shipped a large feature set, not a governance failure. It is what happens after implementation reveals the questions the spec did not ask.

It does change how these documents should be read in the meantime. An error code that says tecFROZEN in the spec and returns tecLOCKED on the network is a small discrepancy with an outsized effect on anyone writing client-side handling, because the client branches on the code and the document is what they branched on. Until these merge, the reference implementation is the authority and the XLS text is a draft of it. Worth knowing before building retry logic against a published table.