Ripple network validators have approved a new feature for the XRP ledger: Deletable Accounts. This new feature took effect on May 8 after attracting an 80% majority support from the validators which held for two weeks.
It will basically allow XRP Ledger users to delete their accounts. The feature was first proposed by cryptographer and leading software engineer at Ripple, Nik Bougalis.
Deletable Accounts Feature Has Been Activated
The Deletable Accounts feature became active on May 8 at 4:29 UTC through the ledger 55,313,921. This was noted by former XRPCentre manager, Arturo Portilla.
The feature allows XRP Ledger accounts to be removed from the ledger and users can recover most of their base reserve that had been locked in the accounts.
Users are typically required to deposit 20 XRP to open an account. Prior to the activation of this change, the users could not be able to recover any of this cost once they decided to delete their accounts. With the feature now live, users can receive at least 75% of their funds after deleting an account. This translates to 15 XRP as 5 XRP is the minimum fee for the transaction that deletes the account.
Does The New Feature Give Ripple Deletion Powers?
The proposal for Deletable Accounts was first discussed in October last year with the main objective of weeding out suspicious accounts and retrieving some of the funds.
According to a blog post in February, Ripple CTO David Schwartz argued that the new feature would be helpful in eliminating spam accounts. He also posited that this feature would “bring further trust to the ledger and ensure that XRPL continues to experience high performance without downtime.”
But after the proposal was made public, some observers theorized that the feature would give Ripple the power to delete XRPL accounts at will and move the funds to a destination address of choice, thereby making XRP more centralized. Christina Comben, a reporter at leading media outlet Bitcoinist even referred to the feature as “disturbingly centralized at best, horribly over-controlling at worst.”
However, the proposal’s author Nik Bougalis maintained that only a user that is able to sign a transaction for the account can be able to delete that account. The user will then specify the account into which the XRP in the account will be moved to in the transaction that requests the deletion. This simply means that Ripple cannot abuse the Deletable Accounts feature.
Moving Forward
Ripple is always working on changes to improve the XRP Ledger and to also expand the use cases for its XRP cryptocurrency. For instance, the San Francisco-based company has proposed more changes for the XRPL, including amendments for transaction fees tracking and robustness issues.
Ripple also acquired Logos Network back in September 2019 to help build XRP-based decentralized finance (DeFi) products. Moreover, Schwartz recently revealed that they are working on a feature that will make it easy for users to create asset-backed tokens directly on the XRP ledger.
For the XRP token, Ripple has secured strategic partnerships with several payment providers and banks that utilize the On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) solution -the payment service that uses XRP- to facilitate real-time cross-border payments.
Per CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s end goal is to become the Amazon of the cryptocurrency industry.
