Ripple CTO David Schwartz is underestimating the true potential of lending on the XRP Ledger, and the Flare Networks ecosystem is ready to prove it in practice.
In his view, one of XRP's chief architects is overlooking what many users have also missed - the scale of external infrastructure that can be integrated into Ripple's network.
Philion explains that while the XRPL's native lending protocol, XLS-66, is stalled at the validator voting stage, his team has already built a workaround. Flare is betting that, with Protocol Managed Wallets and its Flare Confidential Compute stack, any application can be built with whatever logic you want.
In Philion's view, these two components will come as close as possible to giving the XRPL full smart contract capabilities.
As a result, any add-on will function as if it were native to the XRPL. Asset holders will be able to lend coins directly from their native wallets, completely avoiding the risks of cross-chain bridges. But the executive's economic incentive is clear: as always, all fees flow into FLARE.
How to put XRP to work right now: Flare's approach
As evidence, Philion points to a lending market that Flare has already deployed on external platforms using FXRP.
While Ripple's native XLS-66 model, designed for off-chain underwriting by Clearpool and Cicada, is still awaiting approval, investors have already borrowed $7.2 million in the new RLUSD stablecoin through Flare's infrastructure, using 10.8 million wrapped XRP as collateral. This highly concentrated sector, where just three addresses currently hold 93% of the debt in Morpho pools and Sentora provides liquidity, despite RLUSD's total supply of $2.4 billion, clearly demonstrates the potential demand.
Summing up his position, Hugo Philion confirmed that his company does have plans for lending on the XRPL.
Rather than wait for major ledger upgrades from Ripple, Flare intends to deploy programmable logic on its own side, thereby channeling new financial flows into its own ecosystem.
