XRP (2)

Jed McCaleb, an Engineer engineered with a cat's cradle of unquestionable possibilities defied the status quo. Instead of being held in awe of this beautiful technological advancement, he imbibed himself to move this advancement a step further.

What did he discover 🤔?

He discovered The King's flaws, and decided to correct it in the next ice-thawing advancement.

This advanced is what we know today as The XRPL

The king's flaws?

1. the most striking flaw is that Bitcoin is not Carbon-neutral. Another way to put it is that Bitcoin is not environmentally friendly. It uses up a great deal of energy and power supply, so it became an ethical issue.
2. secondly, Crypto's king had and still has a slow throughput(TPS- transactions per second). Its throughput was about 4 to 5 transactions per second.

These are the two main flaws McCaleb purposed to correct.

How?

On the 27th of May, 2011, supposedly some months before XRPL's mainnet was officially launched in 2012 , Jed McCaleb wrote a post on a platform called Bitcoin Talk, expressing his ideas about having a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin which consumes lesser energy, is faster and more cost-effective.

Permit me to inform you that McCaleb had a knack for teamwork and collaboration. You may ask : "How did you know?"

Now this is my argument: He wanted to embark on an innovative project -a project that will turn the tides in the crypto space as well as in the Tradfi space- so he sought the co-operative assistance of two other Engineers in the persons of Engr. David Schwartz and Engr. Arthur Britto.

(Tradfi? Traditional finance. The opp of deFi, Decentralized finance)

There's something off about the consensus mechanism of the XRPL. Some sites I visited opined PoA, Proof of Association, some gave it to be proof of authority. AI said it's both. Nevertheless, XRPL Main site XRPL main site had a different stance. Maybe, it's not so different but they didn't call it Proof of Authority or Proof of Association, rather, XRPL consensus protocol.

I chose to abbreviate it as XRPLCp.

This is basically how this consensus works :

• first, you have to note that XRPL works in a different way while adding ledgers to its blockchain. Each new ledger that is added contains all the records of all other ledgers preceding, such that, even if some ledgers are lost, the blockchain can continue indefinitely.

• You also have to understand that in a ledger or blockchain, almost everything, if not everything you do is a transaction that will be triggered in the ledger. So whether you want to send some coins across or you want to deploy on the ledger, it is a transaction that will be triggered.

• so users transact on the XRPL, these transactions are not submitted one by one on their own...

• there's something called The UNL abbreviation for Unique Node List... it's just a list of selected trusted nodes in the blockchain.

• - For the transactions to be validated and added to the ledger, the nodes in the ledger will first of all select validators that they trust. The mind-blowing fact? This selection is done every 3-5 seconds thereabouts.

• each validator node in the list of trusted validators has to agree at least 80% with the list of transactions proposed in the ledgers before the order of the transactions can be determined.

• Now the consensus there, is the 80% agreement of each node in the UNL with the proposed list of transactions. Basically, if there isn't 80% agreement amongst the nodes, consensus will simply not be reached. This is a way to remove malicious actors because by default the nodes tend to associate more with honest validators so that they wouldn't be kicked out by the ledger.

This is mind racking 😭.

XRPL is a decentralized and distributed ledger....

2020, 2021 or 2022 I would have said "Of course, to an extent I believe"

However, XRPL is truly a decentralized, open-source, distributed and permissionless blockchain.

As of July 2023, Ripple runs only 1 of the 35 validators in the default UNL

Before now, Ripple a partner to XRPL ran around 5 or 6 validators in the blockchain.

As much as XRPL was a great innovation, it wasn't without its own fault.

Ethereum is widely known for its smart contract capabilities. However, we know Ethereum gas fees are not for the weak 😂.

So, a ledger like XRPL should make provisions for developers to be able to code a smart contract and deploy them, considering the inherent qualities of XRPL, you should know it will be a smooth practice —fast deployment time with a low cost.

So, this was the fault, but the King's Personal messenger had to brace up.

Hence, XRPL EVM Sidechain was introduced into the system.

When we discussed Arbitrum, we delved shallowly into different layers of a blockchain. We saw L1 and L2, we saw sidechains —which are basically an improvement of the main blockchain either to scale, to create interoperability or to increase its use case especially smart contract compatibility.

So, if you're a Dev. and looking forward to deploying Smart contracts on this ledger do well to check their docs.

Here's a flower 💐 for you, if you got to this point. Keep building knowledge