Ripple CTO Reveals XRPL’s Evolution: From DEX to Payments

• The core foundational goal of Ripple and XRPL was highlighted by CTO David Schwartz.
• Among the protocol’s fundamentals is its design for the people, not banks.

Following a Twitter thread made by Panos Mekras, a crypto and blockchain advisor who doubles as a financial consultant, about the evolution of XRP, David “JoelKatz” Schwartz, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Ripple Labs Inc has further explained what has transpired between 2013 till now. 

According to Schwartz, the decision to redirect Ripple to payments in 2014 was a function of the performance of the DEX ecosystem on the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

When Ripple pivoted to payments in 2014, it was because the DEX ecosystem on the XRPL was doing well. There was over $8 million per day in swaps and payments that we could 100% confirm was real economic activity.

We wanted to focus on the thing that we felt that we, as a single…

— David “JoelKatz” Schwartz (@JoelKatz) June 11, 2023

At the time, the platform recorded at least $8 million per day in swaps and payments which were ascertained to be 100% real economic activities. Ripple also noticed that at the time, so many companies were not interested in developing an enterprise payment system that could settle with a cryptocurrency, therefore they decided to jump on the nascent venture. 

Fortunately, it was one of the areas where Ripple felt it could focus on without any external interference.

XRPL fit perfectly into the plan in addition to other capability of the solution. Amidst all these, the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) craze began and “we had more money and more employees and could definitely take on more than one thing. We saw projects getting talked into ICOs even where that made no sense for the project and we broadened our focus to try to encourage projects to be more platform agnostic,” Ripple CTO stated.

XRP Was Conceived For People, Not For Banks

Panos’ initial post on Twitter suggested that “It’s sad that a big part of the #XRPCommunity still believes that XRP was created for banks or to help institutions. It was literally created to destroy the banks’ monopoly and disintermediate them.” 

He added “XRP was created as a better BTC for P2P transactions. For people, not banks.”

Attempting to explain further, the original state of XRPL, Schwartz agreed that the original vision of what is now referred to as the XRP Ledger was to be like Bitcoin (BTC). 

However, this time around, natively supporting multiple assets with sophisticated cross-currency. Also, cross-issuer payments and exchanges also natively supported. He remembered his first pitch for XRPL as one which was “deep, fair pools of liquidity between hundreds of assets that anyone in the world can contribute to and draw off of even as they make a payment.”

Currently, a significant number of new projects are leveraging the XRPL and this has led to mass adoption of the protocol. Last year, Ripple activated the exploration of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on its XRPL after the proposal went through a voting process from the Ripple community. Considering the recent dip in the general crypto industry, Brad Garlinghouse, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the payment firm remains bullish about the company’s trajectory.

He emphasized that Ripple is still focused on the long-term opportunity of crypto utility, and they are, therefore, putting their money and minds behind that mission, and partnering with folks who share that vision.

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