Ripple: Xpring’s investment in Towo Labs

Ripple announced a strategic investment by Xpring, which acquired the Swedish startup Towo Labs. 

Xpring is the initiative launched by Ripple developers with the aim of creating the Internet of Value, while Towo Labs is a Swedish startup that aims to simplify the custody of cryptocurrencies. 

The investment will be used to finance the development of firmware for hardware wallets, so as to integrate support for all types of XRP Ledger (XRPL) transactions and a trustless web interface for the XRP Ledger. 

Towo Labs will focus on developing the firmware for the complete XRPL support for Ledger Nano S, Ledger Nano X and Trezor T, in order to make it easier to securely sign any type of transaction. 

The code will be open source and will be subject to security audits by the repository managers involved.

The current firmware supports only XRP payment transactions, which in some cases prevents further innovations related to XRPL and Interledger. The new firmware will support the signing of payments in different currencies, escrow, payment channels, etc.. 

In addition, the investment will also enable the development of new applications, such as trustless and non-custodian trading interfaces for an XRPL decentralised exchange, greater autonomy for DeFi applications, and hybrid multi-signature schemes that require both hardware and software wallet signatures.

Xpring’s investment will also help accelerate Towo Labs’ second project, the development of a new version of the XRP Toolkit, originally created by Towo Labs founder Markus Alvila. 

The new version will have a more intuitive design, support for all 17 types of XRP general ledger transactions, full hardware wallet support and user documentation and will consist of a progressive web application (PWA) with offline support for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. 

Xpring wants to be an open platform for money, with tools, services and programs that make it easy for developers to integrate payments into their applications.

It is based on open source technologies and allows sending and receiving real-time payments in any currency.