XRPL Draft Amendment Proposes Concentrated Liquidity and StableSwap Pools for Native AMM

A draft amendment filed earlier this week on the XRPL standards repository proposes concentrated liquidity and StableSwap-style pools for the XRP Ledger's native automated market maker. The amendment includes a Security Considerations section stating that flash loan attacks are structurally impossible because XRPL transactions are atomic without composable intra-transaction calls.

Recent exploits on other networks have relied on flash loans.

8 million on May 15 to a cross-chain attack that drained funds across Bitcoin, Ethereum, BSC, and Base. Drift Protocol, a Solana-based decentralized perpetual exchange, and KelpDAO, a liquid restaking protocol on Ethereum, together accounted for more than $600 million in losses through April. 8 billion to attacks since 2021, according to Chainalysis.

A significant share of these exploits used some variant of flash loans, a mechanism that does not exist on the XRP Ledger. A flash loan allows a trader to borrow millions of dollars with no collateral provided the loan is repaid inside the same transaction.

The attack pattern uses the same mechanic to manipulate an oracle or drain a pool before repaying the loan, with the entire sequence rolling back if any step fails.

XRPL transactions either fully succeed or fully fail, but unlike Ethereum an XRPL transaction cannot call into another contract during its execution. The borrow-manipulate-repay sequence that defines a flash loan attack requires at least three nested operations inside a single transaction envelope. Flash loans are offered as a product by Aave, dYdX, and other major protocols.