Nik Bougalis, a cryptographer who led XRP Ledger protocol development for nearly a decade, has officially returned to work on the project’s source code. Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz publicly endorsed this return, having previously stated he would only interrupt his own break to work alongside Bougalis again. The specialist opened pull request PR #8300 in the official XRPLF/rippled repository, proposing a deep modernization of the network’s core including moving foundational data types to 64-bit elements and removing unsafe raw pointers. The eighth Ripple employee and author of key cryptographic patents for the platform left in 2022 before becoming CTO of the Algorand Foundation in 2025. His return comes as XRPL integrates real-world assets and the U.S. regulatory landscape continues to shift.
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