Apex

Apex XRPL Developer Summit Amsterdam 2023

- Julian Kanjere

The 2023 edition of the annual Apex XRPL Developer Summit hosted by Ripple and the XRPL Foundation took place on 7th & 8th September in Amsterdam. The summit brought together developers, innovators, businesses, and investors for an inspiring two days, to exchange ideas on all things  blockchain technology and the XRP Ledger.

Offline Payments, Stablecoins and retail-CBDC

Last year, at Apex 2022, I spoke about how we (Mandla Money) are building low-tech digital asset wallets for financial inclusion and universal access leveraging the XRPL. This year at Apex 2023, I had the opportunity to give a talk on the more practical and operational considerations of administering an offline wallet that supports XRPL native and issued assets, and utilises capabilities of the ledger such as the decentralised exchange (DEX). In my talk, I discussed what desiderata for offline payments (the Mandla Wallet is an SMS wallet and I really should refer to this as semi-offline payments before I upset central bankers and economists), our approach to administering stablecoins (and by extension retail CBDC) in an “offline” setting and setting transaction limits for users based on their know-your-customer (KYC) level. I ended the talk with a demo of the corresponding features, and interoperability between the Mandla Wallet and other wallets in the XRPL ecosystem (I used Xumm wallet to illustrate this).

Here is a video of the talk.

Conference Highlights

The other highlights from the conference included:

  • Announcement of upcoming XRPL features:
    • Decentralised identity on XRPL (XLS-40d) – native support for world wide web consortium (W3C) decentralised identifiers (DIDs) on XRP Ledger. Decentralised identity (also known as self-sovereign identity) specifies a lifetime portable digital identity that does not depend on any centralised authority and fulfills requirements such as persistence, global resolvability, cryptographic verifiability, and decentralisation. This will allow XRPL account holder to  create, and manage their decentralised identifiers while having complete control over the private keys and contents of the identity object.
    • Automated market maker (AMM) on XRPL (XLS-30d) – An automated market maker (AMM) is a protocol for a decentralised exchange (DEX) that prices assets through an algorithm, rather than using an order book like a traditional exchange. Currently, the XRPL DEX provides liquidity exclusively by manual market making and order books. Introducing a native AMM will allow users to trade at a certain exchange rate on a DEX without having to find a counterparty e.g. instead of having to find a neighbour who is willing to trade USD for ZAR, or go to the airport currency exchange counter, the AMM allows one to exchange tokens freely.
  • A presentation on efforts and initiatives to grow and support the XRPL community including XRPL foundation, XRPL accelerator, XRPL grants and XRPL commons.
  • A breakout session on payments in emerging markets (e.g. Brazil).

All in all, I find Apex to be a great opportunity to network with the XRPL community and this year was no different – perhaps a little more special given the tailwind the community is currently riding given the glimpses of regulatory clarity around the XRP asset that is starting to emerge!

Apex Developer Summit Las Vegas 2022

- Julian Kanjere

Last month I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the premier event of the XRPL Ledger (XRPL) community – The Apex Developer Summit in Las Vegas, USA. At the event, which is hosted annually by Ripple and the XRPL Foundation I got to meet and engage with the XRPL community, which included David Schwartz, a co-founder and current CTO at Ripple.

Before jumping into a summary of David Schwartz talk on The next iteration of XRPL, recall that XRPL is a decentralised, public blockchain led by a global developer community – think of XRPL as a public good. XRPL makes use of a federated byzantine agreement algorithm that enables fast & cheap transactions with finality achieved in 3 to 5 seconds (in simpler terms, transactions with XRP or XRPL-issued assets complete in 3 – 5 seconds). You can learn more about the XRPL here and join the community on discord here.

Now, back to David Schwartz’s keynote, he started the talk with a look at the XRPL design fundamentals which include:

  • An integrated decentralised exchange (DEX) – the XRPL has features an inbuilt DEX since the beginning (circa 2012).
  • Invariant checking – the ledger has an ability to check for bugs without corrupting the ledger.
  • Rekeyable accounts – XRPL features rekeyable accounts, which is a feature that allows for changing the transaction signing key without changing receiving key.
  • Issued assets – XRPL supports the ability to issue custom assets (e.g. stablecoins or anything fungible that has value and behaves like currency) with ease.

David went on to note some of the exciting XRPL innovations which include:

  • XLS-20d – a proposed standard to issue NFTs on the XRPL i.e. mint/burn/hold/trade NFTs. The XLS-20d is designed for scale.
  • Project Clio – a development initiative to create massive storage reduction for servers that handle queries from clients. This will increase throughput, reduce cost to access the ledger and allow the ledger to scale (bearing in mind that the ledger cannot go any faster than consensus can).
  • Hooks -a feature of XRPL that allows developers to add smart-contract like functionality to the XRPL. Hooks are small, efficient pieces of code being defined on an XRPL account, allowing logic to be executed before and/or after XRPL transactions.
  • Sidechains – a feature of XRPL that allows anyone to run a sidechain to the XRP Ledger while having the freedom to decide how their chains work. You want XRPL mechanics but assets from other chains e.g. running an EVM sidechain to allow even more developers easy access to XRPL’s feature set and bring existing Solidity-based smart contracts written for EVM-compatible chains to the XRPL. Sidechains allow you to innovate at the blockchain level i.e. L1 level e.g. if you wish to tweak the TPS you can do so. Sidechains ultimately provide horizontal scalability.

In addition to David’s keynote, the summit included other keynotes on NFTs, blockchain and law, and new ways to build with some of the ecosystem tools. Here are links to the keynotes:

And then I earlier I mentioned that I got to speak at the conference. I gave a talk on how to send and receive XRPL-based assets in low-tech environments e.g. in place where there is no internet connectivity or smartphones. Here is the link to my talk – Transacting in Low-Tech Environments, Julian Kanjere – I will write a post on this soon.