Reports reveal that Ripple has upgraded its XRP ledger, putting XRP under relatively strong buying pressures.
XRP traded around $1.04 at the time of writing with a daily trading volume of about $4 billion. For the day, XRP is up 2.15%. With a market cap of $49 billion, it is the seventh most valuable cryptocurrency. This week, it gained over 12%.
Ripple reportedly stated that the XRP Ledger (XRPL) is getting a massive update from the Ripple development team.
“Federated sidechains,” introduced in June, will enable federated finance (DeFi) and smart contracts within the broader XRP ecosystem without decreasing XRP’s efficiency.
An announcement from RippleX describes the preview as a tool that allows developers to view the technology, comment on it, and experiment with it.
According to Ripple’s top executive, David Schwartz, sidechains will expand the use cases of the XRPL.
By using sidechains, developers can easily tailor chains to fit their own needs for private networks, securities trading, and DeFi.
When it comes to DeFi, implementing Ethereum smart contracts on top of the XRPL would allow developers to create more powerful apps in the DeFi ecosystem with interoperability across chains.
“Additionally, we’re developing a sidechain for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). XRPL developers will be able to build whatever they want using Ethereum smart contracts, hooks and smart transformers,” he added.
The future of the XRPL mainnet may be shaped by the successful features on sidechains, according to RippleX.
“Federators” would connect the sidechains to XRPL, which are software tools run by parties that own validators on at least one of the sidechains, as Schwartz has previously explained via a blog post. XRP and issued tokens would be able to move between the sidechains and XRPL as if they were their own blockchains.
