Ripple's Ex-CTO Suggests "Reserved Seats" for XRPL Traders Who Hate Front-Runners 🪑

David Schwartz, co-founder of the XRP Ledger and Ripple CTO Emeritus, has outlined a two-part transaction reservation mechanism intended to neutralize front-running and sandwich attacks on XRPL's native decentralized exchange and automated market makers. Schwartz shared the design in response to concerns flagged by XRP-focused analytics account XRPresso.io, writing: "I'm not that concerned about this issue. But I have a proposal for a fairly simple scheme that would eliminate this attack." The proposal, dated June 29, 2026, has not been formalized as a network amendment and remains under community discussion.

The first component is a ReservedTxns ledger object that stores a target ledger sequence number alongside an array of up to 32 transaction IDs. When that specific ledger executes, any matching transactions present in the consensus set are processed first, ahead of all other transactions, and the object is subsequently deleted. The second component is a TxnReserve transaction type, allowing a user to claim a priority slot for one or more future transactions by submitting a reservation before the target ledger closes. XRPL community members had argued that validators and well-connected nodes can view transactions in the pre-validation queue, analyze pending trades, determine profitability, and submit competing transactions to capture favorable prices, and that XRPL's existing mixed-order execution does not fully deter such activity.

Three constraints govern the TxnReserve: the reservation fee must be at least twice the standard transaction fee, the target ledger must fall within 16 ledgers of the current one, and the actual transaction must set its LastLedgerSequence to match the reserved ledger. Protocol changes on the XRP Ledger require a supermajority of validators to vote in favor before activation, meaning the design carries the weight of Schwartz's authorship but still faces a defined governance process before any mainnet deployment.

Separately, $XRP was trading at $1.15, up 0.33% over 24 hours at the time of writing, while futures positioning on XRP remained constructive amid the ongoing XRPL upgrade cycle. The context matters for institutional observers, as asset managers continue to scale inflows into XRP products and any change to transaction ordering rules on the ledger could affect execution quality on the DEX and AMM venues.