RippleX previews federated sidechains to compete with Ethereum

Ripple’s developer arm RippleX has long been focused on developing federated sidechains on XRPL. The team is in the news today after it shared an engineering preview of the same. The federated sidechains are expected to support the developer community and add smart contracts capabilities to the ledger, along with DeFi, interoperability, and NFTs.

At this moment, the team is ready with a preview of this system for developers to experiment with.

In a statement, the team announced,

“Today, an engineering preview of Federated Sidechains that can be used with the XRPL is available for developers to experiment with. Developers are welcome to view and comment on the technical design, as well as leverage this technology to start exploring its potential.”

The development of this system allows each sidechain to act as its blockchain when performing at a high level. Meanwhile, the federation will enable value in the form of XRP and other digital assets to move between the sidechain and the mainnet.

As per the developers, the federated sidechain will operate without compromising the high speed, efficiency, and throughput of the public XRPL Mainnet.

Now, there there are several applications listed by the team of federated sidechains. CTO David Schwartz, at the virtual Apex Dev Summit, noted that the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains would be one of the first applications. The ability to move tokens will make them federated, he added.

While paying special attention to the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, Schwartz also highlighted the accessibility of federated sidechains to a new host of applications.

Right now, the problems with Ethereum are not hidden. Given it is home to a different class of applications, it would be beneficial for XRPL to attract these users.

What’s more, according to Schwartz, migrating smart contracts from Ethereum to the XRP ledger will minimize the barrier to entry for DeFi developers. He added,

“I’m sure many of you have heard the narrative that Ethereum fees mean that it’s very useful, it’s very popular… But it’s important to keep in mind that fees are residual friction that have not been removed by the system.”

Until now, the RippleX team was focused on the popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). However, after the said event, Schwartz and his developers have been promoting the usability of the system.

According to the exec, even Amazon could use the federated sidechains for its blockchain service.

Meanwhile, Ripple has been leveraging the system for its own CBDC efforts. The firm recently partnered with Bhutan to pilot its digital currency using its technology.