Just because Ripple is locked in an ongoing battle with the SEC,
it doesn't mean that they're going to stop constantly developing ways
to improve their protocol and ecosystem.
The wheels continue to spin inside the minds of the leaders and developers at Ripple Labs,
and the court case isn't a reason for them to pump the brakes.
It would be a bad sign if there wasn't new news coming out
about further development and enhancement of the protocol.
Luckily for us, this is not the case.
As a supreme leader, strategist and commander of the XRP Army,
instead of focusing on the court case,
today, let's zoom in on the new and exciting things happening inside the walls of Ripple Labs
and what this means for the future.
Let's get it!
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In this video, we will discuss ongoing developments and news surrounding XRP
as well as checking in on the Flare Network and their new Canary sidechain.
At the time of this recording, the price of XRP is at $1.06,
currently flipping the psychological $1 level from resistance back into support.
Besides settling with the SEC,
what will it take for XRP to continue to charge up the hill
and pass its local all-time high of $1.83?
I think adding smart contracts and NFTs to the arsenal is an excellent place to start.
Over the last nine years,
the XRP community has been committed to the innovation
and forward progress of the XRP Ledger or XRPL
to dramatically increase its decentralization, performance and feature set.
Federated Sidechains,
introduced in June,
will enable federated finance to smart contracts
within the broader XRP ecosystem
without decreasing XRP's speed or efficiency.
This also enables developers to unlock new capabilities
concerning DeFi, NFTs and interoperability.
Explained in this blog by Ripple,
in order to understand the vision for Federated Sidechains,
it's first important to define a federator,
a piece of software that connects to at least two instances of the XRPL software.
The federator software means anyone who wanted to
could run a sidechain to the XRP Ledger.
On one side, the federator is connected to XRP Ledger mainnet.
On the other side, it connects to one or more sidechains.
The federator would be run only by parties who operate validators on at least one sidechain.
According to Ripple top executive David Schwartz,
Federated Sidechains will immensely expand the use cases for XRPL.
In a recent tweet from David,
"Today, XRPL devs can take advantage of the first implementation of Federated Sidechains,
a toolkit or test lab to build your own blockchain
while still enjoying the benefits and functionality of the XRPL mainnet."
This is essentially an engineering preview of Federated Sidechains
that can be used with the XRPL,
which is now available for devs to experiment with.
The successful features on sidechains, according to RippleX,
may shape the future of the XRPL mainnet.
Developers can also create private or public sidechains,
with public sidechains available for the community
to leverage for various use cases.
XRP and issued tokens will be able to move between the sidechains and XRPL
as if they were their own blockchains.
Noted in the dev.io link from Schwartz's tweet,
Scott Determan states,
Federated Sidechains create exciting new opportunities for developers.
They expand the scope for developers to customize the core, proven XRPL technology
to the needs of a specific use case or project.
Examples of the kinds of customization enabled include:
innovative design characteristics that can be tuned to specific use cases
like tokenization, DeFi, or payments;
flexibility to make permissioned or nearly permissionless,
centralized or largely decentralized ledgers
whose assets can be traded on the mainnet DEX;
choice in validators and flexibility of system rules;
opportunity to temporarily manage a sidechain and shut it down
after it has served its purpose.
Federated Sidechains are still being developed
but should be out later this year.
Ripple is also making a splash in the NFT world.
In a recent tweet,
they announced they launched a $250 million Creator Fund
to enable creators to explore new use cases for NFTs on the XRP Ledger.
The fund will provide targeted financial and co-marketing support
for creators, brands and marketplaces
to explore new use cases for NFTs on the XRPL
leveraging its innate advantages of speed, cost and sustainability.
The announcement explained that they want to address growing concerns
relating to the minting of the tokenized artwork,
which includes clunky user experiences,
high transaction fees,
and the possible environmental concerns relating to minting.
Ripple stated,
"We believe NFTs embody the promise of tokenization
and represent a tipping point for its embrace by the mainstream.
Through the Creator Fund and the XRPL,
we're excited to unleash new utility for NFTs
and accelerate the broader shift to tokenization."
NFT marketplaces, including MintNFT and Mintable,
will be among the first to have access to the fund.
Any proposed NFT use case would be built on the XRP Ledger,
giving creators an opportunity to monetize their work.
Ripple CTO David Schwartz said the ledger's low cost, high speed and payments feature
to streamline NFT creation at scale.
In July, Mintable announced it was planning to integrate the XRP Ledger
as it was ideally suited to deliver a seamless experience for NFTs.
The Mintable platform is battle-tested
and has already minted more than 700,000 digital items since 2020.
And the latest from Flare Network,
a recent tweet shows that their Canary project Songbird (SGB)
has officially taken flight and exited its Observation mode.
Like Polkadot with Kusama,
Flare launched this live Canary sidechain that will be a testing ground for the main network,
which will come later depending on how many problems Songbird uncovers.
Assets on Songbird are real and tradable instead of testnet coins.
Blockchain interoperability is a hot topic as of late.
What Flare is doing with Songbird is bringing smart contract functionality
to larger layer 1 platforms that need it.
The four blockchains Flare will connect have a collective market cap of over $150 billion.
If they somehow merged,
it would instantly become the No. 3 blockchain.
Adding smart contract capabilities to chains that are already worth billions of dollars
can be quite impactful for all of them.
Hugo Philion, a co-founder of the Flare Network said,
Flare is Ethereum for all the layer 1s that were left behind.
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But back to Songbird.
It'll follow three phases before it's fully up and running.
Phase 1, known as the Observation phase, just finished up on September 27.
The final two phases are the StateConnector
and the F-Asset protocol,
which Hugo described as a trustless wrapping program.
Like Tekashi 6ix9ine rolling up on Chief Keef.
He described Flare as having the potential to be like a general
that can control actions on other connected networks.
Hugo elaborated,
"Songbird marks a key step for the entire industry
in enabling tokens on networks without smart contracts
to be used trustlessly and in a non-custodial manner
for the first time with scalable smart contracts."
At the time of this recording,
Songbird is trading for only 57¢ after correcting from its all-time high of 70¢.
Now, unless you were there in time for the airdrops,
the only place you can acquire Songbird is on Bitrue.
It's only been trading there in USDT and an XRP pair for eight days.
We're so early to this coin
that the market cap and circulating supply aren't even listed yet on coinmarketcap.com,
where it's currently ranked 2815.
Imagine what Bitrue would be sitting on if you were this early to the Kusama party.
The XRP ecosystem is bullish as ever.
The night may seem dark with a looming SEC case,
but it's always darkest before the dawn.
With smart contract functionality and NFTs on the horizon,
as well as Flare's new Canary project starting to sing its song,
the price action for XRP in Q4 is going to rise up into the sky
faster than the morning sun.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.