Evernorth, a treasury firm holding XRP on behalf of the Ripple ecosystem, plans to deploy its native token holdings across the XRP Ledger to back a native lending proposal currently under validator review.
The company's Chief Business Officer Sagar Shah said Evernorth intends to use its XRP treasury productively rather than hold it passively. The move centers on XLS-66, a proposal that would introduce lending functionality natively into the ledger's core protocol rather than relying on smart contract-based DeFi applications.
Validators on the XRP Ledger are currently reviewing XLS-66 and assessing whether its code meets robustness standards required for protocol-level changes. Shah said ledger-native lending could reduce risks inherent to smart contract-based lending, where bugs or exploits in application code have caused repeated losses on other blockchains.
The XRP Ledger has resisted adding smart contract functionality for years, instead emphasizing payment settlement and reserve operations. Native lending would represent the first major expansion of the ledger's financial primitives beyond payments and asset issuance. The proposal has drawn interest from institutional participants seeking yield on XRP holdings without moving tokens to external platforms.
Evernorth was created to manage XRP allocated by Ripple to support ecosystem development. The firm's backing of XLS-66 through a treasury deployment removes one barrier to implementation, though validator consensus remains uncertain. Any protocol change requires supermajority approval from the ledger's validator network.
The timing aligns with broader pressure across blockchain ecosystems to compete on yield generation. Ethereum and Solana have attracted capital into lending and staking applications, creating incentive for the XRP Ledger to offer comparable on-chain returns to retain treasury and institutional asset holders.
Validators must weigh code quality against adoption velocity. The number of validators currently reviewing the proposal and their assessment timeline remain undisclosed.
