Are you a developer looking to start your blockchain journey or build on the XRP Ledger (XRPL)? Look no further than the XRP Ledger Learning Portal, the just-launched learning tool that simplifies the learning experience for developers wanting to start building.
XRPL Grants is helping enable developers to leverage the XRP Ledger’s (XRPL) open-source technology to further innovate in the Internet of Value. If you’re a developer and would like to build a project on the XRPL, keep reading to find out more info and how to apply.
by Mayur Bhandary, Software Engineer at Ripple
Validators are the lifeblood of the XRP Ledger. This post seeks to explain the function and importance of validators on the XRP Ledger network.
A new XRP Ledger Devnet is now available for developers to access upcoming features of XRPL on beta build versions of rippled, the C++ reference implementation of the XRP Ledger.
By Rome Reginelli, Documentation Engineer at Ripple
Blockchain technology raises new questions about the roles of privacy and anonymity in the function of money. While all transactions are a matter of public record, the parties involved in the transactions are represented by pseudonyms, and information about who those parties are may be hard to come by. Even more obscure is information about those whose computing power and maintenance efforts underpin the blockchain. While there are lots of good reasons to maintain privacy around some entities and events, there are also situations that call for publicly establishing one's identity and reputation. The xrp-ledger.toml specification provides a flexible standard for voluntarily publishing information about who you are and what you're doing with the XRP Ledger.
In this post, I explore the process of creating an xrp-ledger.toml file, explain why to use it, and introduce a new dev tool for checking xrp-ledger.toml files.
Today, a new XRP Ledger explorer is available for both test net and production at explorer.xrpl.org.
As part of the recent site relaunch, the XRP Ledger Dev Portal has an updated version of the WebSocket API Tool. This tool lets you communicate directly with rippled servers, which power the XRP Ledger network. Among several of the improvements in this new version of the tool is that you can choose which servers to connect to, including the public servers Ripple runs, servers in the XRP Test Net, or your own server running locally on your own computer.
xrpl.org is a new, community-driven website for developers to access technical documentation, developer tools, tutorials, and network metrics for the XRP Ledger. The XRP Ledger is one of the largest, most technically mature, open-source, public blockchain networks in the world. If you are learning about, building on, and contributing to the XRP Ledger, xrpl.org is your best resource.
By Nik Bougalis, Engineering Manager
The primary mission of the C++ team at Ripple is to contribute to rippled, the reference implementation of the protocol that underpins the XRP Ledger. The codebase—which is now over 6 years old—has contributions from over 100 developers from all over the world.
As a team, our primary focus is on ensuring that the codebase is solid, that the code is robust and that it is well-suited to be the core of the next-generation of financial infrastructure, one which allows value to not only move as fast and as efficiently as information does today, but to move securely as well.
In an earlier blog post, I noted that our existing software development and quality assurance process—honed over several years—places heavy emphasis on correctness and security. I highlighted our use of automated tests and specialized tooling (such as static analyzers) but I also alluded to the human element as well: our rigorous and public code reviews and regular security audits of the codebase by specialists. I’d like to take the opportunity to discuss those practices in greater detail.
Here at Ripple, we've been eagerly following and contributing to the progress of Interledger, a neutral standard for connecting all money systems into an Internet-like network of networks. Since finalizing the core protocol suite in late 2017, contributors from a variety of companies and backgrounds have been working hard on growing the ecosystem with implementations and infrastructure. Progress has been rapid and wild, so we thought we'd help make sense of it by checking in to see where Interledger stands today.
As rippled servers operate, they continually witness data appended onto an ever-growing blockchain. This data becomes the history that the network agrees upon and that constitutes everything about the XRP Ledger.
As with most blockchains, it is imperative that XRP Ledger historical data remain readily available to participating servers. Therefore, every rippled server shares the responsibility of storing some history. But what if keeping the full history of the XRP Ledger starts to exceed the storage facility of most participants? For example, as of this writing, the space required to store full history of the XRP Ledger is over 8 terabytes, a hefty flash sum.
The history sharding feature, enabled in rippled version 0.90.0, addresses this issue by distributing history into segments called shards. A shard contains all of the data for a range of ledgers. Using the history sharding feature, individual rippled servers can contribute to storing historical data without needing to store the entire history.
To provide additional predictability to the XRP supply, Ripple has locked 55 billion XRP (55% of the total possible supply) into a series of escrows. These escrows are on the ledger itself and the ledger mechanics, enforced by consensus, control the release of the XRP.
As Ripple progresses towards further decentralizing the XRP Ledger, we want to make server operators and members of the XRP Ledger community aware of a few upcoming changes to help ensure the reliability and stability of the network as it transitions to a distributed architecture with fully decentralized validators.
Blockchain technology is set to fundamentally transform the way the world moves value, but to do so, it must first meet a number of challenges.
By Nik Bougalis, Engineering Manager
2016 was an important year for Ripple. Banks were added to our growing network, we completed a successful Series B investment round and formed the Global Payments Steering Group. Underlying all those milestones was the Ripple Consensus Ledger (RCL), which runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and recently celebrated its 4th birthday on February 17, 2017. In 2016 alone, RCL closed over 8 million ledgers, processing more than 225 million transactions and handling more than $1 Billion dollars in payment volume throughout the year.
By Nikolaos D. Bougalis
Ripple Labs is considering the addition of a new elliptic curve implementation to the Ripple protocol to complement the existing cryptographic system. The addition of a Schnorr-based cryptosystem will produce more optimal and secure design schemes and provides a platform for robust and sophisticated functionality while preserving existing network structure and efficiency.
Ripple names work in conjunction with Ripple addresses as a destination to receive funds, as an identifier for the sender, and as a handle to set trustlines.