• The “Hooks” amendment to the XRP Ledger is scheduled to launch in Q1 on a public testnet.
• The developers are introducing a transaction field that could be extended in the future to create new use cases such as decentralized exchanges.

Wietse Wind, Chief Developer of XRPL Labs, has made a new update on the progress of the “Hooks” amendment. One of the most anticipated features due to its promise to integrate basic smart contract capabilities to the XRP Ledger, “Hooks” will soon be deployed on a public testnet.

In his previous update, Wind revealed that the XRPL Labs team adopted a web assembly runtime engine based on the C++ programming language, called SSVM. To test consensus on the ledger with Hooks, the team set up two private testnets for validators. Thus, they were able to fix an issue of transactions produced by the hooks by creating separate transactions from the original tx.

Wind affirmed the preliminary results for the two validators looked good. However, they did get a flaw in the way the transactions were queued and communicated between the two validator nodes. Basically, one of the nodes was issuing the transaction prematurely and the other was not receiving it, preventing a consensus from being reached. Then, Wind’s team came up with the following solution:

To achieve consensus on emitted transactions we now emit them into a special directory on the ledger itself rather than emitting them directly into the transaction queue. This means all validators have a chance to produce and agree on what the emitted transactions indeed are before they attempt to queue them for application to a future ledger.

To issue and process a transaction, the developers have therefore introduced a new transaction field called “First Ledger Sequence”. This field must be added to all transactions issued by validators. In principle, the field prevents “infinite loops” from occurring, but Wind says that it can be extended in the future to create new use cases such as decentralized exchanges:

(First Ledger) will allow validators to hold emitted transactions for future execution some specified number of ledgers later. This can be useful for on-chain bots, for example: Automated Market Makers (…).

Developers can contribute to the XRP Ledger amendment

Furthermore, Wind revealed that everything is in place for the launch of the public testnet of the “Hooks” amendment which is expected to be deployed in the first quarter of 2021. Wind asked the community for “patience” and called on developers to contribute to the development of Hooks.

In the near time, the team will focus on the deployment of the testnet. Wind disclosed the following about their next steps:

Some edge and corner cases still need to be debugged with emitted transactions, and the slot component of the Hooks API (which allows hooks to request and read all sorts of different data from the ledger) needs to be finished. We are well on track for a Q1 testnet release.

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