On Friday, the XRP market will see two events occurring around the same time: the release of US data on CPI in August, and the official activation of a XRP Ledger amendment. The former is related to expectations of a Federal Reserve interest rate cut, while the latter reflects the current progress of the XRPL upgrade. Both events could affect the market's short-term focus on XRP.
Two events occurred at close times to each other.
According to the schedule in the text, the U.S. Consumer Price Index for August ( CPI ) will be released at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, and the activation time of the XRPL amendment is expected to be at 11:15 a.m.
This means that within a few hours after the release of macro data, the market will continue to digest the new developments at the network level of XRPL. For XRP, the focus of funds may fall on both inflation data and ecological upgrades.
This activation does not include any popular features.
The report mentions that this amendment has completed the voting process required by XRPL. According to the rules of XRPL, the amendment needs to receive support from over 80% of trusted validators and maintain this support for two consecutive weeks before it can enter the activation phase.
However, the features that will be activated this time do not include several other functions that are of greater interest to the public, such as Confidential Transfers (confidential transfer) and Dynamic MPT.
Among them, confidential transfers are one of the six amendments in version XRPL 3.3.0. The purpose of this feature is to prevent the transaction amounts from being publicly displayed on the blockchain for multi-purpose token transactions.
However, as of the time of reporting, the support rate for verifiers who received confidential transfers was less than 23%, and the support level for Dynamic MPT was also close to this figure, still significantly falling short of the 80% activation threshold.
The amendment Batch is closer to meeting the requirements.
In comparison, the Batch amendment, which is also known as XLS-56, is currently advancing at a faster pace.
It is mentioned in the text that among the 35 validators, 23 have expressed their support, which is slightly more than 65%. To meet the activation requirements, an additional 28 votes from validators are needed, thus surpassing the 80% threshold, and this level of support must be maintained for two consecutive weeks thereafter.
Judging from the current progress, Batch is closer to the next stage than confidential transfers and Dynamic MPT, but it still does not meet the formal activation conditions for the time being.
CPI is still a larger external variable.
Compared to the on-chain amendments, the U.S. CPI data for August, which was announced earlier on Friday, may have a more widespread impact on the overall market.
Report reviews indicate that in the United States in July, CPI was 3.4% year-on-year, and the core CPI was 2.5%. Prior to the release of these inflation figures, U.S. employment data had already shown weakness. In August, non-farm payroll additions were 22,000, lower than the market expectation of around 75,000, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%.
If the figure on CPI in August falls short of expectations, market bets on a more substantial interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve may increase; if the data is higher than expected, it could reduce the room for rate cuts. For risk assets, including XRP, changes in macroeconomic expectations may still be the more direct factor driving prices.
