Ripple Engineers Unveil New Iteration of XRPL Sidechains

RippleX, the developer arm of blockchain company Ripple, has revamped the design of XRP Ledger’s sidechains, according to an update shared by software engineer Scott Determan.

As reported by U.Today, Ripple CTO David Schwartz introduced the concept of federated sidechains last year, a feature that would allow XRPL to compete with Ethereum by implementing smart contracts. They can also unlock more tokenization capabilities.

Since sidechains have their own validators and their own set of custom transactions, it is possible to test new features on XRPL without compromising their functionality.

Sidechains rely on a feature called a «federator» that connects them to the mainnet.

The new proposal intends to replace the federator with a «witness,» thus offering more simplicity. This would allow different services to act independently instead of relying on a shared entity.

The new design concept addresses such issues as transition throughput and fee escalation.

Since transactions are not submitted by the server, users can decide on what specific fee to use.

The proposal would also make it easier for developers to test new features and fix vulnerabilities due to the simplicity of the witness server.

The witness would have to watch transactions and attest that they have moved to specially designated accounts.

As reported by U.Today, XRPL validators also recently started voting on enabling the XLS-20 amendment that would bring native non-fungible token functionality to the ledger.

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