Listen, an interesting thing: the developers of the XRP Ledger, a blockchain that is closely related to Ripple and is used mainly for fast and cheap international payments, are going to make it compatible with Ethereum. How? They plan to launch a sidechain with support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in the second quarter of this year.
To put it simply, EVM is the kind of thing that runs most smart contracts in the Ethereum ecosystem. The XRP Ledger currently supports its smart contracts, but they are incompatible with Ethereum applications. And if you launch a sidechain with EVM, then developers from the Ethereum environment will be able to easily launch their dApps (decentralized applications) based on XRPL. This can greatly expand the XRP ecosystem.
Ripple is doing the project together with Peersyst, and they use evmOS as a technological base. The sidechain is already working in test mode, and if everything goes smoothly — after all checks and approvals with validators — it will become part of the main network very soon.
Important: This sidechain will be connected to the main XRPL via a bridge using Axelar. This will allow tokens to be transferred between networks, such as wrapped XRP, which will be used as a gas payment, like ETH on the Ethereum network.
By the way, there is also Flare Network, which also adds EVM functions for XRPL, but this sidechain is a separate initiative from Ripple, which makes everything especially interesting: it looks like they seriously want to expand their influence in the world of DeFi.
The question is, do you think they will be able to attract developers from Ethereum to their ecosystem, or have they joined the race too late?
