Introducing xrpl-py version 2.0.0-beta.0

Today, RippleX and the XRP Ledger Foundation (XRPLF) are proud to present xrpl-py version 2.0.0-beta.0. This beta version introduces three new ways to generate wallets, regular key support, and some breaking changes to the Wallet class.

High Level Changes

The three main breaking changes made in this update are:

• The sequence field has been removed from the Wallet class
• Seed generation now uses hex strings instead of UTF-8 strings
• Wallet class methods now use the Ed25519 algorithm by default.

The Wallet class previously included a sequence field to make sending transactions easier. In practice, it made things harder. You usually don't know the sequence number when you create a Wallet instance, and you needed to manually increment the number after each transaction. It is safer to get the sequence number from the ledger, the real source of truth, when you auto-fill transactions.

Generating seeds from an entropy string now takes in hex strings instead of UTF-8 strings. This was especially necessary to implement wallet generation from XLS-12 Secret Numbers, commonly used by the Xaman app. xrpl-py used to treat entropy as a UTF-8 value, but that's problematic because not all byte strings are valid UTF-8 strings, preventing us from the full range of random entropies for seed generation.

Lastly, when you initialize a Wallet from a seed without specifying an algorithm, the library now uses Ed25519 by default since it has better performance and other convenient properties compared to the secp256k1 algorithm. Previously xrpl-py would try to interpret the algorithm from the seed. To use the old encoding, you can specify algorithm=secp256k1 when initializing a Wallet object.

Breaking Changes

Wallet Class

• Removed sequence field
• Changed constructor to take in public and private key as required parameters
• Changed class methods to use the Ed25519 cryptographic algorithm by default
• Changed address and classic_address fields to read only

Core Keypairs

• Changed the generate_seed method to take a hex string instead of a UTF-8 string
• Ed25519 key string is formatted with padded zeros if length is less than 32 bytes

New Features

Wallet Class

• Added methods to generate wallet from seed/secret, entropy, and XLS-12 secret numbers
• Added support for regular key pairs
• Added the field address which is an alias for classic_address

How to Migrate

Wallet Sequence

Before:

OfferCancel(
    account=WALLET.classic_address,
    sequence=WALLET.sequence,
    offer_sequence=OFFER.result["tx_json"]["Sequence"],
),

After:

OfferCancel(
    account=WALLET.classic_address,
    sequence=get_next_valid_seq_number(WALLET.address, client),
    offer_sequence=OFFER.result["tx_json"]["Sequence"],
),

Core Keypairs Seed Generation

Before:

DUMMY_BYTES = b"\x01\x02\x03\x04\x05\x06\x07\x08\t\n\x0b\x0c\r\x0e\x0f\x10"
seed = generate_seed(DUMMY_BYTES.decode("UTF-8"))

After:

DUMMY_BYTES = b"\x01\x02\x03\x04\x05\x06\x07\x08\t\n\x0b\x0c\r\x0e\x0f\x10"
seed = generate_seed(DUMMY_BYTES.hex())

Wallet Constructor

Before:

wallet = Wallet("snoPBrXtMeMyMHUVTgbuqAfg1SUTb", sequence=1)
// wallet.classic_address: rHb9CJAWyB4rj91VRWn96DkukG4bwdtyTh

After:

wallet = Wallet.from_seed("snoPBrXtMeMyMHUVTgbuqAfg1SUTb", algorithm="secp256k1")
// wallet.address: rHb9CJAWyB4rj91VRWn96DkukG4bwdtyTh

Start Building

You can install this beta version using pip:

pip install xrpl-py==2.0.0b0

If you're just getting started using xrpl-py, see Get Started Using Python, the xrpl-py source code repository, or reference documentation.

We hope you enjoy building the Internet of Value, and feel welcome to reach out to the XRP Ledger developer community if you have any questions or suggestions!