In today’s XRP news, David Schwartz, Ripple CTO Emeritus and XRP Ledger co-founder, proposed a transaction reservation mechanism to prevent front-end and sandwich attacks on the protocol’s decentralized exchange.
The proposal comes as community discussion on the XRP Ledger payment infrastructure intensifies and coincides with active community voting on the XRPL 3.2.0 update.
Schwartz’s proposal came with
Concerns have been raised about the possibility of frontal or transaction sandwich attacks on XRPL payments and cross-bidding.
For the reasons I’ve explained, I’m not that worried about this issue. But I have a proposal for a fairly simple scheme that would eliminate… https://t.co/lnhTv1bhBK
— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) June 29, 2026
XRP News: What the TxnReserve Proposal Really Does
The core mechanism introduces a new transaction type, TxnReserve, and a new ledger object, ReservedTxns, which contains a series of transaction IDs assigned to a specific future ledger. To reserve a slot, a user pays at least double the normal transaction fee and specifies a ledger sequence number and transaction ID in advance.
Reservations are limited to 32 spaces per ledger and are limited to the next 16 ledgers. Crucially, the actual transaction is transmitted only after the consensus set of the previous ledger is known, a time window that denies potential pioneers the visibility they need to act. The reserved transactions are then executed first, in reservation order, before all other transactions on that ledger.
Schwartz described the protection clearly: “This ensures that you can execute your transaction before any transaction that was formed after your transaction was revealed. You would use this approach any time you want to execute a transaction that you want to ensure cannot be interleaved or preempted.”
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The problem that David Schwartz’s proposal tries to solve
The concern raised by XRP-focused community account XRPresso.io is that transactions in XRPL are sitting in a publicly visible queue before a ledger is closed.
Validators and well-connected nodes can inspect pending trades, assess whether a sandwich attack, placing orders on both sides of a target trade to extract value, would be profitable, and spam multiple transactions to game the deterministic canonical order decided by transaction hashes.
This is a variant of what the broader DeFi industry calls MEV (maximum extractable value): the profit available to block producers or validators who can reorder, insert, or censor transactions.
The same dynamic has affected DEX traders on other chains; MEV and initial concerns about high-volume DEXs have become a standard structural risk for on-chain traders across the industry.
Schwartz acknowledged the theoretical exposure, but rejected its severity, noting that validators would need to simultaneously maintain high liquidity to make targeting volumes worth targeting and low liquidity to move prices at a reasonable cost, a contradictory requirement.
“If multiple validators colluded, or a single validator attempted it, it would be very obvious to everyone exactly who was doing this,” he said, adding that no real-world front-end execution attempts have been reported on the XRPL DEX outside of proof-of-concept demos.
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Critics say visibility, not rate priority, is the real solution
Hello Vet or XRPL Foundation: What are the next steps in this process?
David made a technical/written proposal here.
I also made one in the thread for confidentiality provisioning (the most complete solution in my opinion).I wonder what this discussion is like… https://t.co/N8JsjVRSfM
– XRPresso.io (@xrpresso_io) June 29, 2026
In other XRP news today, XRPresso.io acknowledged that while the reserve idea is interesting, the double fee requirement complicates things without addressing the core issue of pre-validation visibility.
They prefer a specific confidentiality solution for pending order details, similar to the approach suggested by Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, which uses zero-knowledge cryptography to hide order data until execution.
However, some critics argue that this privacy-focused approach risks recreating insider trading dynamics that public blockchains were intended to eliminate.
The ongoing discussions around the TxnReserve proposal suggest a broader rethinking of the XRPL upgrade process and the protocol’s incentives, rather than a simple fix.
No formal vote has been taken on the proposal and specifications are not finalized. The direction of the community, whether it leans toward fee-based priority ordering, a privacy solution, or a hybrid, will influence AMM and DEX infrastructure as on-chain trading grows.
Additionally, Ripple’s regulatory progress in Luxembourg under MiCA underlines the importance of ensuring DEX fairness for institutional considerations beyond retail.
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