During the APEX, or the XRPL developer summit organized in Amsterdam on September 6 – 7, The Cryptonomist interviewed Jas Takhar, Senior Director, Software Engineering at
Ripple, to talk about the future of the ledger.
Summary
What are the development-side targets by the end of 2023?
With Ripple X we contribute to open source software, we don’t own Ripple D, which is the application that empowers the XRP Ledger. We are a player who is a participant in a public decentralized network so we are gonna propose some features but it’s up to the community to validate us to assess the feature and say “yes, this is a good idea for the ledger, we want to vote for it”.
Running up to the end of the year we have a lot of good news. We released a new version of Ripple D, the software that runs the ledger, and in that there is the AMM. There has been a lot of excitement around the automated market maker, so we are gonna propose that as an amendment and the community will look at the code and the feature and hopefully they will soon vote on that and then activate it.
After that we have sidechains and a two-way bridge that we call the witness service. Definitely before the end of the year there will be another release of Ripple D so we are gonna propose XRPL sidechains to mainnet. We are also looking if it makes sense to bridge the ledger to other chains and protocol, not only Ethereum.
Can you tell me more about decentralized identity? It’s a big topic you are covering at APEX this year
The third thing we are going to propose within the end of the year is decentralized identity. As technology moves on in this decentralized world there is going to be a need for some form of decentralized identity (DID), which it means there is no centralized authority or organization who owns your identity and uses for their own purposes.
Social media uses your identity to market you, but with a DID you are in charge of it, it’s up to you to reveal it to a third party, you control it. And a DID doesn’t exactly reveal who you are, so you can be anonymous. On the XRP Ledger today there is no form of decentralized identity, there is the notion of an account of course so this is very big for Ripple.
What area of web3 is dapp development for XRPL focused on?
Dapps usually refer to apps built on smart contracts and another thing coming down the pipe, as I mentioned, is XRPL sidechains and we are soon going to propose EVM sidechains. When they will come into fruition then dapp developers on Ethereum can just drop onto the sidechain and have that compatibility to bridge with the XRP ledger.
In terms of native dapps on the ledger there is a DEX built in 2012 from the very beginning. So it’s native to the protocol itself, built by the very first architects of the protocol. A lot of these solutions built on top of the XRP ledger use these native features.
Are you also engaged in the development of real world asset tokenization? If yes, how?
We consider XRP ledger as a venue for institutional adoption and we see real world asset tokens as a part of that. If you read various reports from Citi Bank or Boston Consulting group, by 2030 there is gonna be between 4 and 5 trillion dollars worth of assets that are gonna be tokenized on various blockchains.
In addition to that amount of real world assets there is gonna be one trillion dollars of these tokenized assets, so a large amount of traders across various chains. I am very bullish on tokenization in general because of all the friction in the traditional system today and real estate will be a part of it.
What role does XRPL play within the global economy with regard to the development of CBDCs?
Ripple is a leader in this field. Juniper wrote a report in the last couple of months about the best database softwares for CBDC and Ripple is one of the market leaders for this technology according to them.
We are very proud of what the CBDC team has built and now the platform is getting recognition across the industry. There are 6 pilot countries and there are more in the pipeline, for example Palau with their own stablecoin and Montenegro, Hong Kong and Colombia.
