In the fall, we launched Xpring as Ripple’s open developer platform for money.
Last weekend, we sponsored ETH Denver, one of the largest Ethereum hackathons and conferences in the U.S.
Unsurprisingly, one of the most frequently asked questions that we received while on the ground at the event was:
“What is Ripple doing at an Ethereum thing?”
Fair question. Glad you asked 🙂
First, some relevant background:
- Xpring is default open, meaning we build open source software, open protocols and open standards and we love to work with others that do too.
- Almost all of Xpring’s 40+ engineers work on open-source software full-time.
- We actively contribute to and / or support open source projects, including the C++ (rippled) implementation of the XRP Ledger, the Rust and Java implementations of Interledger Protocol, Codius, Web Monetization, Open Payments, and several other open source core libraries.
- We have also held a seat on the C++ Standards Committee since 2015 and are members of the W3C for web payments, so we like contributing to open standards.
- We believe that developers should be given a choice on how to solve their problems, which is one of the reasons why we think interoperability is so important for crypto and blockchain technology to reach mainstream adoption.
The last point is the most relevant to the Ethereum community, which recently created an inspiring mission to reach 1 million developers worldwide. We believe that in order to achieve this feat faster, not just for Ethereum but across all blockchains, it’s best to combine efforts, pool resources and work together where appropriate to make it easier for developers to BUIDL on blockchain.
So, Xpring sponsored three challenges during the Sustain Web 3 virtual hackathon on Gitcoin leading up to ETH Denver. Each challenge has an interoperability theme with a focus on building bridges between XRP Ledger (XRP) and Ethereum (ETH) over Interledger Protocol (ILP).
You may recognize that we were inspired by the Norse mythology of Bifröst, a burning rainbow bridge that reaches between Midgard the realm of the humans, and Asgard, the realm of the gods (Vanaheim and Niflheim are two of the other nine realms).
Turns out the rainbow bridge theme was also on-brand for ETH Denver as well.
We think the XRP to ETH and ERC-20 tokens bridge is important since XRP is one of the most liquid crypto currencies in the world, but doesn’t have a compute layer to support complex smart contracts for the growing Decentralized Finance (DeFi) market on Ethereum.
The challenges are still live on Gitcoin until 02/26/2020, or whenever completed, so we invite developers to explore them and contribute if they seem interesting.
We look forward to working with more blockchain communities in the future.
