Flash loans have cost DeFi protocols hundreds of millions of dollars. The XRP Ledger’s answer to this problem is elegant in its simplicity: make them impossible in the first place.
A new draft amendment called AMM Swappable Curves, filed on May 26, 2026, by developers Denis Angell and Roman Thpt, expands the ledger’s automated market maker capabilities while reinforcing a design philosophy that sets XRPL apart from Ethereum-based DeFi.
Why XRPL can’t have flash loans
Here’s the thing about flash loans on Ethereum: they work because the Ethereum Virtual Machine allows composable smart contracts to chain together multiple actions within a single transaction. Borrow millions, manipulate a price oracle, drain a liquidity pool, repay the loan, all in one atomic block.
XRPL doesn’t allow this. Its transactions are atomic in a different sense: each one is a single, self-contained operation. There are no composable intra-transaction calls. You can’t string together a sequence of complex DeFi interactions within one transaction the way you can on Ethereum. The attack vector simply doesn’t exist on XRPL — they’re structurally impossible.
