• The XRPL development team is working on a smart contracts feature dubbed Hooks and will integrate it into XRPL transactions.
• Ripple developers also proposed the XLS-30d standard emphasizing on DeFi and expanding the financial options available to liquidity providers.

Ripple’s native cryptocurrency XRP made solid gains earlier this week gaining more than 20% in the last 24 hours and is currently trading at $0.4581 with a market cap of $23.3 billion. As per the latest development, the XRP Ledger is currently on the cusp of a major paradigm shift related to smart contracts.

Currently, the XRPL development team is working on a smart contracts feature dubbed Hooks and will integrate it into XRPL transactions. This is currently in development by the XRPL Labs and shall provide additional basic functionality on the base layer.

Furthermore, Peersyst is working on an EVM sidechain that would change the ecosystem’s course and shall go live in 2023. As a result, the XRP EVM sidechain will be able to do computing at par with other chains like Solana and Ethereum that support smart contracts.

Last year in June 2022, Ripple developers also proposed the XLS-30d standard for a native automated market maker (AMM). The devNet AMM is already operational and the proposal is in the draft. This particular AMM standard emphasizes on DeFi and expands the financial options available to liquidity providers.

Even though XRPL is open source, the XRPL Foundation and XRPL Labs have been the major contributors to the platform’s development. Furthermore, Ripple also supports the growth of ecosystem services either through its own initiatives or by offering grants to other ecosystem-related companies.

XRPL’s PoA Consensus – Pros and Cons

As we know, the XRP Ledger uses the Proof-of-Association (PoA) consensus model also dubbed Federated Byzantine Consensus Protocol. Each node within the PoA network has to create a list of trusted nodes to consult while seeking consensus.

Ripple calls this list of trusted nodes a Unique Node List (UNL). Thus, to take part in the consensus, a validator first needs to earn the trust of other nodes and it cannot rely alone on financial resources. A node not having the trust of the other nodes won’t be a part of the UNL and thus, won’t have any influence over the system. Also, the PoA system won’t require a lot of hardware thus bringing down the operations and electricity costs.

However, the downside to PoA is that it cannot punish the bad actors. This is because PoA isn’t constrained by large capital or large outside costs. Also, the nodes can be moved out of the UNL in retribution and the validator links could be broken.

Ripple Vs SEC

In other news, the latest developments in the Ripple vs SEC case shows that the case is coming to a conclusion with chances of Ripple winning. This was precisely the reason that the XRP price shot up by more than 20% in the last 24 hours.