DeletableAccounts and Two Other Amendments Expected Soon

Three amendments to the XRP Ledger protocol currently hold support of a majority of trusted validators, and are expected to become enabled on the following dates (in UTC):

fixPayChanRecipientOwnerDir is expected on 2020-05-01.
fixCheckThreading is expected also on 2020-05-01.
DeletableAccounts is expected on 2020-05-08.

As long as these amendments continue to have the support of at least 80% of trusted validators continuously, they will become enabled on the scheduled dates. All three amendments were introduced in rippled v1.4.0.

Action Required

If you operate a rippled server, you must upgrade to version 1.4.0 or higher by 2020-05-01, for service continuity. Version 1.5.0 is strongly recommended.
The DeletableAccounts amendment changes the starting sequence numbers for accounts. If you have automatic processes that send transactions from newly-funded accounts, please check that the change does not break critical processes.

Note Regarding Payment Channels

The fixPayChanRecipientOwnerDir amendment previously gained majority support in January. However, several trusted validators withdrew support from the amendment because it would cause breaking changes to the account_channels API method. Version 1.5.0 of rippled contains a fix that makes the account_channels API method continue to work without breaking changes. If you use account_channels, be sure to upgrade to rippled version 1.5.0 to avoid breaking changes to the API.

Impact of Not Upgrading

If you operate a rippled server but don’t upgrade to version 1.4.0 or higher by 2020-05-01, when the fixPayChanRecipientOwnerDir and fixCheckThreading amendments are expected to become enabled, then your server will become amendment blocked, meaning that your server:

Cannot determine the validity of a ledger
Cannot submit or process transactions
Does not participate in the consensus process
Does not vote on future amendments
Could rely on potentially invalid data

If none of the amendments become enabled, then your server will not become amendment blocked and should continue to operate.

For instructions on upgrading rippled on supported platforms, see Install rippled.

DeletableAccounts Summary

The DeletableAccounts amendment makes it possible to delete XRP Ledger accounts.

If you have accounts on the XRP Ledger, you may be able to reclaim some of the XRP account reserve by deleting your accounts after this amendment becomes active. Deleting an account costs 5 XRP and sends the deleted account's remaining XRP to another address. You can send the remaining XRP to another account you own, or even deposit the remaining XRP at a hosted wallet such as an exchange. (When sending to a hosted wallet, be sure to include a destination tag or use an X-address.) Not all accounts can be deleted. For the complete list of requirements, see Deletion of Accounts and the XRP Community Standards Draft 7.

With this amendment, new accounts start with their Sequence numbers equal to the Sequence number matching the index of the ledger in which the account is created. This change protects accounts that have been deleted from having their old transactions executed again if the same address is later re-created.

Without this amendment, new accounts always start with their Sequence numbers at 1, and there is no way to remove accounts from the state data of the ledger.

fixPayChanRecipientOwnerDir Summary

Changes the PaymentChannelCreate transaction type so that it adds new payment channels to the recipient's owner directory. Without this amendment, new payment channels are added only to the sender's owner directory; with this amendment enabled, newly-created payment channels are added to both owner directories. Existing payment channels are unchanged.

This change prevents accounts from being deleted if they are the recipient for open payment channels, except for channels created before this amendment.

fixCheckThreading Summary

This amendment fixes an aspect of the Checks amendment and has no effect until the Checks amendment is also enabled. However, enabling this amendment first ensures that all Checks have proper threading metadata from the start.

The fixCheckThreading amendment changes the way Checks transactions affect account metadata, so that Checks are properly added to the account history of the receiving account. (Specifically, they update the PreviousTxnID and PreviousTxnLedgerSeq fields of the receiving account's AccountRoot object, which can be used to trace the "thread" of transactions that affected the account and the objects it owns.)

Without this amendment, Checks transactions (CheckCreate, CheckCash, and CheckCancel) only update the account history of the sender. With this amendment, those transactions affect both the sending and receiving accounts.

Learn, ask questions, and discuss

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Related documentation is available in the XRP Ledger Dev Portal, including detailed example API calls and web tools for API testing.

Other resources: