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A few weeks ago Ripple organized the APEX Developer Summit, an event held in Amsterdam to reunite all the developers and projects based on the XRP Ledger. On this occasion, The Cryptonomist conducted an interview with CTO David Schwartz about this ledger and its future goals.
What are the development-side targets by the end of this year?
One of the biggest things is the adoption of the Automated Market Maker (AMM) on the XRP Ledger. We will definitely love to see it happen sooner rather than later. It’s a process of convincing the community that it is secure and it does what it is supposed to do, so we cannot have complete control over the timeframe because we cannot tell the people what to do but that’s a big one.
Two others that you should see by the end of the year for the XRP Ledger is the support for sidechains to allow people to scale the XRP Ledger and also the decentralized ID pack.
How are you working on real world asset tokenizations?
Ripple itself is not really developing anything for real world asset tokenization. The XRP Ledger has this capability and those can at some point become Ripple’s products but not in the short term. In the short term I think what you are going to see is other participants in the ecosystem building real world asset tokenization support in very different ways.
Those are really good products market fit and the XRP Ledger has something called issued assets since 2012 and we also have support for NFTs and which you can tokenize real world assets through NFTs. The technology is a good fit for that use case. We have a DEX that allows people to buy and sell tokens and that’s gonna leverage some of the XRP Ledger core functionality with a high speed of the transactions of a 5 second confirmation window and the fees are very small. These are good fit for real world asset tokenization.
In which areas of the Web3 are you focused on?
Decentralized identity is a big focus for us and I think you are going to see more DeFi applications through EVM sidechains. We sponsor a company which is building an EVM compatible chain which means you can launch smart contracts on Ethereum and you can interact with the assets on the XRP Ledger. That will enable any of the Web3 use cases you can do within Ethereum on the XRPL ecosystem.
CBDC: what’s the role of XRP in this market?
It’s very hard to predict where CBDCs are going. There is a significant commitment for a number of central banks to develop them. We decided that we are going to build a CBDC implementation on the XRP Ledger. We wanted to get a couple of central banks onboard and we sent one of our sales representatives and he can back with 10.
So now we actually have 10 partners. We announced quite a few of them. It’s early experimentation. No one is actually committed to deploying anything. Central banks are more conservative than the Catholic Church.
They risk trust in their entire country’s economy but they are very interested in the technology and they do see the potential. And I think part of the potential here is to be able to provide a broad access to a sort of core financial service. I know people are skeptical about more government involvement.
They seem to think that’s going to be dystopia but the truth is the exact opposite for us. It’s very difficult for the government to discriminate because they are subject to transparency laws and you can sue them in court, while private companies can discriminate what they want and you cannot do anything about.
CBDCs are going to be better particularly in countries where they are not well served by existing financial services. It’s still early to say. Most of the CBDCs now are exploratory.