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Xahau Network

What Is Xahau (XAH)?

Updated

If you're new to XRP, you may have noticed some of us discussing another network named 'Xahau', or its native currency, 'XAH'.

It's Like XRP ... But Different

The Xahau network was created in 2023, and its starting point was the open-source code for the XRP Ledger. A small team of researchers and entrepreneurs decided to add smart contracts to the network code.

The XRP Ledger has no smart contract capabilities, by default.

To integrate smart contracts, the team decided to use an architecture that includes 'WASM' or 'web assembly' code. Each account can have up to 10 'hooks' installed that are triggered for transactions that match specific criteria. They can run before or after a transaction is processed. This enables a variety of use cases that do not involve the need to change the network's core code.

Hooks

A 'hook' is what is known as a smart contract that can be triggered in relation to a specific account and its transactions.

Xahau Smart-Contract-HooksXahau Smart-Contract-Hooks

The term arises from the programming world, where it generally means "code that runs based on triggering conditions." In Xahau's case, it indicates code that is run before, or after, a transaction is processed.

A hook can also be triggered by the passage of time (CRON). ⏰

Each hook must be installed on a specific account by the party that controls the account - i.e., the secret key holder.

What Can XAH Do That XRP Cannot?

The primary benefit from the use of hooks, is that the core network code does not need to be changed every time a new use case is identified. This means that additional use cases can be addressed immediately, with no requirement for intervening steps, such as:

  • Community review
  • Community approval
  • Amendment voting

All of those steps are eliminated with the use of hooks; new use cases can be addressed as fast as the code can be developed.

Key Differences From XRP

Other unique differences from the XRP Ledger include:

  • Smaller supply ~655 million coins vs. 100 billion coins
  • XAH 'hodlers' are rewarded at 4% of their account balance
  • UNL participants are incentivized
  • Payment channels available for user-created tokens (IOUs)
  • URI tokens instead of NFT tokens

Why Xahau?

Hooks are the mechanism, but they're not the pitch.

Why Xahau?Why Xahau?

What actually makes Xahau worth a business's attention is what people have already built with that mechanism - faster settlement, built-in compliance tooling, real DeFi, an emerging anti-fraud layer, and use cases that stretch well past finance.

Here's a closer look at each.

Project L-10K

One of the primary enhancements that the Xahau development team accomplished was to supercharge the throughput ... up to ten thousand transactions per ledger. This project was known as 'Project L-10k', and was completed in 2025 contemporaneously with the first production remittance application to use Xahau.

Production settlement service level agreements demand robust & dependable responsiveness.

Inline Payment Firewall

Compliance with AML and KYC regulations requires organizations to have total control over value transfers into and out of their ledger wallets. Xahau is one of the only current cryptocurrency networks that has a protocol-layer equivalent of a 'payment firewall'.

If an organization only wants to accept transfers from whitelisted accounts, that can be done with hooks; and several production implementations have put this approach into effect.

Remittance Settlement Layer

One of the flagship projects for Xahau is the cross-border remittance application built by three parties, with guidance from the InFTF: Quantoz, Cooperative Bank of Oromia (Coopbank), and TerraPay all collaborated to bring EURO-to-BIRR cross-border value transfers, with a fully built-out production application going live on May 6, 2026.

Xahau isn't only theoretical infrastructure for crypto speculators - it's already settling real money, for real banks, in a live production remittance corridor.

Decentralized Finance

Xahau's roadmap has promised native DeFi primitives in its latest roadmap - an Automated Market Maker (AMM), a price oracle, and a cross-chain bridge called FeatureExport.

"Price oracle" is now live; but two of those features still require a network-wide amendment vote before they are activated later in 2026.

Rather than wait, a Xahau community developer known as Cbot built One Xahau, a full DeFi suite implemented entirely with hooks: an AMM, a collateralized lending pool, and perpetual futures contracts.

One Xahau Defi SiteOne Xahau Defi Site

Fees from all three products route into a DAO treasury, governed by a token called XXX that's earned by liquidity providers and consumed (burned) with every vote - giving it a built-in deflationary mechanic.

Early results are encouraging: a side-by-side comparison of order books found the Xahau EVR/XAH pairing running a tighter spread and considerably deeper liquidity than the equivalent pairing on the XRP Ledger, just weeks after One Xahau's AMM launched.

Anti-Abuse Layer

Public, irreversible ledgers are efficient for legitimate users - and just as efficient for thieves. XRP Ledger history includes plenty of phishing and giveaway scams, and once stolen funds start hopping through freshly created "mule" accounts, tracing them has traditionally fallen to unpaid volunteers and community forensics accounts, racing the clock before funds reach an exchange and get cashed out.

Odin's Eyes is a Xahau-native attempt to fix that. One account (the "Eye") maintains a shared, on-chain reputation registry - clean, suspicious, or confirmed malicious - for addresses across the ecosystem. Any participating account installs a lightweight companion hook (a "raven") that checks incoming transactions against that registry.

Odin's Eyes Agentic Security ProtocolOdin's Eyes Agentic Security Protocol

To keep the watchers engaged, Odin's Eyes pays out a capped-supply reward token (RVN) - a small baseline reward just for actively screening traffic, plus larger bounties for confirmed catches.

It's a paid, incentive-aligned alternative to the volunteer model that's driven anti-fraud efforts on public ledgers.

Limitless Use Cases

Account-based smart contracts - up to ten per account - enable almost anything a developer or entrepreneur can imagine, and the use cases aren't limited to trading and payments.

Take Mithra, a sensor company co-founded by Xahau's Wietse Wind after his own home flooded when a decades-old sewer alert system (a simple buzzer) failed to notify him in time.

Mithra's LoRa-connected sensors monitor equipment like sewer pumps - tracking runtime, current draw, and temperature to predict failures before they happen - and publish that data directly on-chain via Xahau "invoke" transactions, signed by the sensor hardware itself.

Because the data lives in a hook's on-chain storage rather than a single company's private database, it's available to any interested party: homeowners, maintenance contractors, insurers, or researchers - without vendor lock-in. In one early real-world test, a Mithra sensor flagged a failing pump at an Amsterdam daycare center days before it would have overflowed.

It's a useful illustration of the broader point: once you can attach programmable logic to an account, the line between "blockchain project" and "ordinary business problem" gets a lot blurrier.

Who's Who of Xahau?

The list of those that are either founders, or closely associated with the founding organizations, is extensive. Here are the names of three organizations mentioned in the whitepaper, or their current moniker:

Xaman (formerly Xumm) is a non-custodial wallet built by XRPL Labs, the Netherlands-based team founded by Wietse Wind that has served as one of the primary engineering forces behind both the XRP Ledger and Xahau ecosystems. Gatehub is one of the oldest XRP Ledger gateways and wallet providers, issuing fiat and crypto IOUs since 2014 and now serving as the main bridge that lets XRP Ledger users acquire and redeem native XAH. InFTF is the nonprofit successor to the former XRP Ledger Foundation - rebranded in 2024 to reflect a broader mission - which now focuses on compliant, blockchain-based remittance infrastructure for underserved markets, with Xahau as its preferred settlement network.

There exists a long list of impressive developers, architects, and technologists among the Xahau inner circle. But the three names that people associate most prominently with the leadership of the Xahau network are Wietse Wind, Richard Holland, and Denis Angell.

The links to their 'X' accounts are:

The Relationship: Xahau & XRP Ledger

So how do Xahau fans view the relationship between XRP and XAH?

The Xahau team - and many of its community members - advocate for the use of a 'dual-chain' solution to implement smart contracts. In addition, a third community of loyal DePIN fans see an additional component in the list so that the XRP Ledger & Xahau can access any conceivable use case for cryptocurrency: The Evernode network.

Evernode allows the procurement and incentivization of decentralized infrastructure; in addition, it supports smart contracts with limitless complexity, using a consensus engine borrowed from the XRP Ledger.

Synergistic NetworksSynergistic Networks

  • XRP Ledger: Best at payments & robust utility functions
  • Xahau: Predominantly XRP Ledger code, but with account-based smart contracts called 'hooks'
  • Evernode: A DePIN network that can handle high-complexity smart contracts

Xahau also hosts the financial incentives for the Evernode network, and is scheduled to tighten its orchestration with the XRP Ledger, via an amendment (in progress as of this writing) called 'FeatureExport'.

Competition Or Synergy?

From an economic standpoint, every chain that has its own digital asset is a competitor in a narrow, liquidity-only sense; but the simple way to think about Xahau, is that a 'bunch of XRP geeks' decided to implement smart contracts on their own version of the XRP Ledger.

The team emphasized transparency along the way, and initially received support from the primary XRP stakeholder, Ripple. They published Xahau as open-source code that could, in theory, be back-engineered and integrated with the XRP Ledger.

Synergy effects between the two camps speak to a genuine camaraderie, with many Xahau developers being open and willing to help with changes to the core XRP Ledger protocol. You can find many examples of this open dialogue on the 'X' platform.

XAH Distribution

The Xahau whitepaper originally targeted a 600 million XAH distribution: 96 million split across eight validator seats, 16 million to Gatehub, 160 million to Xaman, and 328 million to the Foundation. What actually happened on-chain differs slightly - some funds went to early vendors and investors instead - but the total landed almost exactly on target, at roughly 599 million XAH.

That's a supply about 1/200th the size of XRP's, but it's still a large amount of coin for the market to track, understand, and account for.

Here's how that supply breaks down today, by holder:

HolderXAH Held% of Total SupplyStatus
Xaman Treasury125,000,000~21%Locked in a time-released smart contract; key to be blackholed
InFTF Treasury250,000,000~42%Locked in a time-released smart contract; key to be blackholed
Everybody Else224,000,000~37%Circulating among validators, early investors, vendors, and the general public
Total599,000,000100%

The two treasury wallets alone account for more than three out of every five XAH in existence.

Rather than use simple escrows, both organizations locked their holdings into hook-based, time-release smart contracts - a more technically demonstrative approach that still lets the wallets keep claiming their monthly balance-adjustment reward. If the maximum amount is claimed every period, the release schedule unlocks over roughly six years.

A dashboard exists to display the current status of these XAH Vaults: xahau-treasury.xrpl-labs.com/

Even with those two mega-wallets accounted for, XAH ownership remains fairly concentrated - a common early-stage pattern, but one the network will need to address as it matures.

How To Purchase XAH

If you wish to speculate by buying XAH directly, it depends on where you are located. If you're in a country that is supported by Bitrue or Coinex, you can directly purchase or trade XAH by using those centralized exchanges.

If you're in a country not supported by either of those two exchanges - such as the United States - you can exchange RLUSD or XRP for (Gatehub) XAH on the XRP Ledger Decentralized Exchange. Several convenient interfaces exist to do this, including the Xaman non-custodial wallet.

Xaman: Using the Xaman non-custodial wallet, go to the xApp tab, and choose the 'DEX Trade' xApp, and use it to acquire (Gatehub) XAH IOUs. Then, use a different xApp called "XAH Teleport" to convert them into real, native XAH on the Xahau network.

Where Xahau Still Has Work To Do

No introduction to a young network is complete without an honest look at what's still unfinished. The following areas are ones where work remains to be done:

  • Better Orchestration With The XRP Ledger. The FeatureExport bridge is a sought-after amendment that has the potential to expand current 'Xahau-only' projects like One Xahau and Odin's Eye to the XRP Ledger.
  • Hook Auditing Is Young. While a community developer has stepped forward in a major way, constructing hook auditing and hook 'prover' software, this is still a fresh space; trust in published, proven hooks is improving.
  • Ownership concentration. As covered above, more than half of XAH's circulating supply sits in two founder-linked treasury wallets. Even with those wallets locked into gradual, transparent release schedules, that level of concentration is a major risk factor for speculators.
  • Liquidity Sources. The shut-down of BItmart subtracted one major CEX from Xahau's liquidity; however, it still lists two major exchanges: Coinex and Bitrue. There has been recent discussion of bridging to other networks with DEX-enabled protocols, such as Solana.

None of this is unusual for a network in its third year of operation; it's simply worth knowing within the context of a comprehensive introduction.

The Future Of Defi And Payments

Once you've seen the extensive list of use cases that XAH easily handles, it's truly inspiring. Xahau is everything that you love about XRP, plus a long list of more things to love. ❤️

Be an early adopter of XAH and the Xahau network! Follow the accounts that seem to reflect your own interest - speculator, developer, or crypto fan. You have a place in our community, no matter what your background or interests are. Welcome to the future of crypto Defi and Payments.

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Sources:

XahauXAHEvernodecryptocurrencyDefi

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