Steering Committee

Since the last committee

Days of activity from September 3 to September 23, 2026. Each box is one calendar day, shaded by that day's commit volume; the number on the right is the count of distinct active days.

Swell readiness

The buildathon is closed. What remains between now and New York is payouts, the booth, and the stage.

Hackathon app: prizes through Clear

Payouts migrated from the in-app XRPL wallet to Clear on September 4, with the historical payouts imported behind a versioned contract and a synchronous admin migration. The Sumsub integration and the XRPL payout wallet are gone (Sep 15), along with the retired Xaman and WalletConnect address-verify flow. Money-correctness holes found in review were closed the same week: the gateway owns the retry, an unreadable reply is indeterminate, per-member shares are honest. Public side: the hackathon page redesign (Sep 21) with event imagery, project pitch videos and logos, sponsor prize logos, a faucet-links page in place of the sponsors page, and the public leaderboard removed. Admin: expanded projects CSV export. 53 commits over 15 active days, the busiest product repo.

Clear: the payment gateway, now two apps deep

Renamed Clear on September 3 with the XRP Identity design language. Since: a durable, source-authenticated import API for legacy payments, historical payments exposed in the admin, incremental database migrations. Glow's Kudos payouts moved to Clear on September 22, so two apps now pay through it. Next is the Swell prize run.

Merch: a swag shop paid in XRP ↗

Florian's shop, from the April starter to a deployed app in five days and hardened over the next ten. Public product, checkout and order-status pages; a payment watcher with reconciliation and order expiry; partial payments accumulate and show the remaining amount; every shop payment carries the XRPL Commons source tag. Checkout offers Xaman, WalletConnect, Otsu, MetaMask Snap and Ledger through xrpl-connect, which surfaced three upstream bugs that Thomas fixed within the day. The back office is booth-oriented: order list, CSV export, pickup token on a QR, a testnet/mainnet toggle, and a "sale over" switch per article. Two security audits closed critical findings before launch. Deployed on App Platform on September 13.

Invitation cards ↗

Nada moved the card renderer into the browser (canvas), dropped the backend and shipped the generator as a static site on September 9. Judge, mentor and hacker categories, the designer's revised template, a link preview generated from the same renderer, and native share to X and LinkedIn where the OS share sheet takes files.

Academy

Tushar shipped the Advanced Payments, DEX and Liquidity Applications workshop and a contextual "Ask a Mentor" inside the code editor (Sep 21). Academy MCP agents now authenticate with XRP Identity, which gained an OAuth path for them (Sep 22); PATs stay for CLIs. Nada rebuilt the landing page from the new-branding wireframe (Sep 23). Underneath, a production out-of-memory investigation: a 15-minute memory breakdown in the cron tick and an admin-only heap snapshot endpoint.

Swell slate

• Thomas, 10 minutes: the new client. Set.
• Product demo, 25 minutes. Decided on September 3 that we take the slot; what fills it is the vote below.
• Luc's talk, proposed: XRP Identity, one login for the ecosystem. Unchanged since September 3. The academy's MCP agents are the first non-browser clients of it.

What the fleet tells us

Fathom, the org's cookie-free analytics, was rolled out to every app on September 4: one site per domain, one issue per repo, all nineteen closed the same day. This is the first time the committee sees usage across the whole fleet in one place. Pick a site, then a range.

Three sites carry the traffic

Over the last 90 days the corporate site, the hackathon platform and the training site account for 96% of recorded pageviews. Google sends about a fifth of the corporate site's visits; the Aquarium page is the most-read page after the home page. On the hackathon app the Make Waves page alone took 1,452 views in the last 30 days, and chatgpt.com now appears among its referrers. The academy has reported since September 11: the core-dev bootcamp journey and its "build and run xrpld" module lead.

Instrumented, not yet live

Only nine of the 24 domains actually load the tracker today. Twelve apps merged the plugin on September 4 and have not been redeployed since; deploys are manual since August, so the code is on main and not in production. Three were never integrated: the website (an integration sits on a branch), Clear, and the tests site. Issues are filed for the website and Clear as of today. The twelve redeploys are one fleet command away.

Where is our value?

Everything we build for builders is free: the academy, the hackathon platform, xrpl-connect, XRP Identity, the tools on xrpl.at, office hours with a tech partner. The proposal on the table is to move to a paid model for the services that help builders explore the technology. Not to fund ourselves, at least not first. Because a price is a signal. A free bootcamp is a nice-to-have; a paid one is a commitment, for the builder who takes it and for the funder who reads the invoice. Perceived value follows the price tag, in the eyes of our users and in the eyes of the people who fund us.

The counter-argument is real: we are a commons, the ecosystem is early, and friction at the door loses builders we would never see again. So the question is not "paid or free" but which services, what model, and why. Answer for each service below; the room's picture builds as you go.

What we build next

Swell closes the summer. Three candidates for the next product, each an extension of something already live, and a fourth door for the idea that is not on this list.

• Sites. An internal static publisher: drag a folder into a browser and it is live in seconds at name.sites.xrp.lc, company-only or open to a list, with one-click rollback and an audit log. The spec is written. It would host this steering site, and could carry the live answers this page uses as a built-in feature for every page anyone publishes.
• Multiplayer XRP Identity. XRP Identity already signs one person into every app we run. Multiplayer means people acting together: teams and roles that follow you from a hackathon to the academy, shared sessions, and AI agents that act for you across apps, the multi-app step after "bring your own AI" per app.
• Multiplayer Gossip. Gossip is our internal contact and event platform, fed by HubSpot, Eventbrite, Customer.io and more. Multiplayer means opening it beyond a single operator, so events, community and BUILD work from the same picture of who we know and what they came to.
• Something else. Name it and describe it below.

Working with the tech team

Requests reach the tech team through Slack threads, hallway conversations, meeting notes, and occasionally an issue. Nothing is decided here: this is about what works best for you.

Amendment voting

Eighteen amendments are pending on mainnet. Activation needs 28 of the 35 UNL validators for two weeks. Bars show today's vote count and the dark line is the threshold. The right-hand column is our own validator's vote, read from the validations it signs, so it is what the network sees rather than what our config says.

Batch v1.1 activates on September 29

BatchV1_1 crossed the threshold on September 15 at 29 votes and activates two weeks later unless it drops below 28 before then. Our position since September 16 has been no, pending two rippled changes: the multi-signed signing prefix (PR 8163, still open with conflicts and no review since September 3) and the AccountTxnID fix from the attackathon (PR 8134, approved, then closed on September 23 as "moved to a private repository"). Neither is in 3.4.0, released September 17. The amendment will activate without them. The decision for the room is whether we publish a position paper explaining what we would have wanted merged, as we did for XLS-65 and XLS-66, or let it go quietly.

Where our validator stands

• It reports 3.3.0. That is the version in its own signed validations, read by both XRPScan and the XRPL Foundation's registry on September 24. If an upgrade to 3.4.0 was done, it did not reach the UNL validator, or the service was not restarted. Worth checking on the host today.
• Two amendments are invisible to it. fixCleanup3_4_0 and LendingProtocolV1_1 were introduced in 3.4.0. A 3.3.0 server does not know them, so we cannot vote on either until the upgrade lands. fixCleanup3_4_0 matters to us: the AccountTxnID fix for Batch was gated on it.
• Yes on two: SingleAssetVault (XLS-65, 17 votes), consistent with the "why we voted yes on XLS-65" post on the website, and fixXChainRewardRounding (11).
• Not voting on the rest, including Batch and BatchV1_1 (above) and LendingProtocol (XLS-66, 13 votes). From outside, "not voting" and an explicit veto look the same.
• PermissionDelegationV1_1 sits at exactly 28 of 35, the threshold, with no majority timer reported yet. If it gets one it activates two weeks later; we do not vote for it today.
• Housekeeping: XRPScan cannot verify the domain of v2.xrpl-commons.org because of a TLS error on our side, and the amendment test harness has had no commit since July 28.

Briefs and housekeeping