With Wietse Wind, CEO of XRPL Labs & Scott Chamberlain, Co-Founder of Evernode
6th November 2023 – In a recent installation of Bitrue’s Twitter Space AMA, we delved deep into the world of Xahau and its profound impact on the XRP Ledger ecosystem. In this AMA, we had the privilege of hosting two remarkable guests, each with their unique perspectives and contributions to the XRP Ledger ecosystem.
Wietse Wind, the visionary founder of XRPL Labs, introduced us to the remarkable achievements of his team, notably the non-custodial wallet Xumm, and their relentless commitment to enhancing the XRP Ledger. Wietse explained how they recognized the need for improved developer composability and embarked on a journey to create Hooks, a smart contract technology native to the XRP Ledger, which has now evolved into the live network known as Xahau. Scott Chamberlain, a lawyer turned blockchain enthusiast and co-founder of Evernode, shared his journey from the legal world to the world of smart contracts. His collaboration with XRPL Labs and his dedication to exploring the potential of smart contracts paved the way for the development of innovative solutions, including Hot Pocket, which laid the foundation for what Evernode has become today.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the main Q&A’s below:
Q1. Thank you both for the introduction! Let's start the AMA with an overview of Xahau. Could you provide an overview of what Xahau is and how it enhances the capabilities of the XRP Ledger?
Wietse:
Yeah, of course. So what we've built, the smart contract technology for the XRP Ledger we refer to as Hooks, is quite the change. It's a number of lines of code that one developer doesn't easily comprehend looking at it. And it's also something that changes the dynamics of the ledger of the fee structure to some degree because fees are slightly higher, invoking smart contracts. It changes a lot of things. While we still have the goal to see Hooks on Mainnet one day, we realized in the past year that the Hooks technology is actually quite controversial in many ways when it comes to Mainnet adoption because it changes fee structures, because it brings a lot of new features, and because it hasn't been used in production.
And even though we had multiple audits and are quite confident that the technology is ready, so confident that we're actually running it on a live network today, it's so much easier to gain traction with the technology to allow. People to develop on it, to allow users to use it, allow businesses to implement what they can do in real life today on a digital ledger, on a network that has the new features and the risk appetite to do that today. And then, over time, as we gain experience and more confidence, then hopefully, Mainnet governance can vote on it with more confidence. Until then, we didn't want to take the opportunity to build everything we can now, having Hooks available without it being available on Mainnet with real value. So that's where Xahau comes in. Xahau is basically the XRP Ledger protocol, but with the Hooks amendment and some other amendments, we can actually provide the features Hooks and other amendments bring today without having to go through all the stages on Mainnet to launch the technology.
Scott:
Sure. So Evernode needs Xahau to exist because it needs Hooks to exist. And I think Evernode is a very good example of the types of things, or it's certainly a very complicated example of the types of things you can build with Hooks. One of the things that Hooks does is effectively take an XRPL account and automate it. You can add logic to the account so that it applies rules to the transactions it will accept and to the transactions that it will emit. And importantly, it applies those rules before the transaction gets accepted into the ledger. When we were developing Evernode, we tried very hard to build it on the XRP ledger.
And even when it became clear that Hooks wasn't going to be an easy thing for the ledger to adopt, we looked at a version of Evernode that simply used an XRPL account with a multi-sig XRPL account to manage our registry and to manage our treasury. And it didn't work. And the reason it didn't work was if you use a transaction if someone sends a transaction to that account, it gets accepted into the ledger, provided it's properly formed. You can't decide to reject that account if it's wrongly formed. So, we had a problem where if someone tried to register as part of the Evernode network and sent us the wrong registration fee or the wrong registration details, that transaction would be valid from the ledger's point of view but invalid from our point of view. And we'd have to go through a process of refunding, reversing, or undoing that transaction. All of which becomes complicated and a potential attack vector. You just imagine people sending us the wrong amounts in registration and then claiming that we are somehow keeping their money when we just didn't even want it in the first place. What Hooks does is say, well, this is a wrongly formed transaction. I've been told not to accept this transaction, so I reject it. And it never makes it into the ledger. It's like it never existed. And that sort of thing is incredibly powerful. So, with Hooks, what you can do is have an account that is its own master. It controls itself. It lives and dies by its own rules.
And we use that, in particular, to take our currency EVERS, which is otherwise an issued currency, on the ledger and turn it into a counterparty-free asset because the emission of that asset won't be controlled by anybody who holds any number of keys. It'll be controlled by the hook itself. And that's quite a powerful example of the things that Hooks can achieve that you simply can't do with the ledger (the XRP Ledger) at the moment.
Q2. We understand that XAHAU has been developed by 5 independent entities. Can you explain to us how your entities play a role in it and how they contribute to it?
Wietse:
So what started as basically some people sharing thoughts on how smart contract technologies could contribute to actually building use cases and businesses on top of the XRP Ledger. As you have more discussions with other people to see what the technology should look like, you also realize that there are different angles to consider building a technology. So, almost right from the start, we realized that there are some entities with extra knowledge to contribute or an extra big stake in the game who could immediately contribute and use the technologies being built. One of the companies, obviously, was my own company, XRPL Labs, where we already built a lot for the XRP Ledger. And the core technology that we're talking about here, this Hooks amendment, was something that we could definitely build and contribute to, especially Richard Holland working at XRP Labs. He's crazy in all the good ways being able to code up this technology.
I think we all know GateHub in this space, and if we don't, then shame on you. Go learn. Because GateHub has been here almost since the start of the XRP Ledger, and they issue stablecoins on the XRP Ledger, and they allow you to bring your Fiat to the ledger and take your stablecoins from the XRP Ledger back to your bank account. Do the same thing. They do the same thing with cryptocurrencies, and that's actually very interesting. And especially with all the use cases Hooks are very suitable for, stablecoins are very important, and you can use those stablecoins today. Besides their contributions to the ecosystem and technology, they also bring the ability to use this technology in retail environments, for example.
And then we have Titanium OU, very skilled in the infrastructure side of things, amongst other things. But if you send a transaction over the XRP Ledger today, there is definitely a very high chance that, at some point, you're going touch infrastructure managed by Titanium OU. It's a decentralized network, anyone can run anything. But running good and high-quality infra is something that's almost a full-time job, and they're doing very well. And then you have Evernode Scott introduced Evernode just now. If you want to say some more about Evernode, please do so in a couple of seconds. But Evernode is a prime example of how we can build even more on this technology. And as he mentioned, Hooks are very important for Evernode to achieve that goal.
Then, we have Digital Governing OU, which consists of professionals from the accounting and finance world, and they will make themselves more known soon. But it's obviously clear that in the next years, the traditional finance world, the accounting world, when it comes to compliance and identity, all of those things, the digital ledger environment will have to work with that world and vice versa to make real things happen. One addition, by the way, is Titanium OU. All of you in this space know Bharath, Alloy Networks? He's that guy. And Scott, do you want to add anything?
Scott:
Sure. Evernode is part of the Xahau Launch Alliance because Evernode wants to exist, and it needs hooks to exist. And Xahau is the way that Hooks exists, and we couldn't do it on our own. It's a significant undertaking, launching a chain, and I am absolutely delighted to see it happen. We flatter ourselves that Evernode would be like a house anchor tenant, certainly its first major use case. And that's why we're there because we want to exist, and we're very close.
Wietse:
It's also important to know that besides the entities just mentioned, well, obviously, these are the five independent entities part of the Xahau Launch Alliance. There are other contributors to the space all the way from the start, and there are actually community members in this space, developers, and project owners. So the idea was that, and that actually happened, that the second the network launched, it wasn't just a party by five businesses, but it's actually a gathering of everyone in this entire ecosystem to contribute even more to the ecosystem and leverage the new opportunities Hooks bring and show on the Xahau network. That this is something the entire space can contribute towards.
Q3. What sets Xahau’s governance mechanism, the ‘Governance Game’, apart from other projects? How does it work?
Wietse:
So there are many different ways to solve governance challenges. But we're all in this space because we know or everyone in this AMA and everyone who followed us building what we launched. We're in this space, in this XRPL ecosystem, and we know how the governance in the XRPL ecosystem works. Hopefully, where you have validator operators, they vote on things, and then at some point, if you hit a number of validators above 80%, that is, who agree on something, then something happens on the ledger. But the only ones who can vote are the validator operators. And then the only validators, to some degree, who have a large overlap, the only ones who cast a vote that actually counts, are the ones that are usually on the UNL, the unique node list.
The interesting thing Xahau adds is that because it has smart contract technology and Hooks, it allows for other things to be voted on the ledger without even running a validator. As long as you're part of a governance group, a table of 20 seats, you can cast your vote, and it counts directly on the ledger without specifically running validators or other infra. And the Xahau network has this table with 20 seats, and every seat can be divided again in basically another table. That way, you can have a primary seat that gets split into another table with, for example, developers from the ecosystem who have an entirely different perspective, or project owners with yet another different perspective, or security auditors who will look at whatever change is proposed in a completely different way. And they can all cast their votes. And all the second layer table votes end up being one primary table vote. So we're calling those L1 seats, like the primary table, and then L2 seats, the secondary table, which means that if you take the 20 seeds and you split them up into another 20 seats, you get a very large group of people who contribute in any capacity to the ecosystem and get a say in what happens on the ledger and in the ecosystem.
Scott:
Sure. So, every chain needs to think about governance because it's not going to launch perfectly. And even if it launches perfectly, it's not going to stay perfect with the way the world works. And you need to update. So you need some mechanism for adjusting for the future. The interesting thing about Xahau is that its governance mechanism arises from the existence of Hooks. So the UNL or the DUNL, that's a separate concept that still applies. But if you've got a Hook and that Hook is going to issue your tokens, which is what happens in Xahau, you need a mechanism to govern that hook. You need somebody or a group of people to hold the process by which that Hook can be updated. And so we've taken the need for those people to exist and turn that into the Governance Game.
And what we get out of this Governance Game is both a decentralized way of managing the update of the hook and a more rigorous on-chain version of a UNL. Because there's a requirement to be in the Governance Game, you have to maintain a reliable validator. So it's really innovative solution to a very practical problem, which is that somebody had to control the keys to the Hook in order to allow the Hook to be updated. And so we've got this process of 20 seats that can be divided into each of them can be divided into 20 seats and all of them can come together and have a say about how the Hook gets updated and at the same time be required to provide the infrastructure by way of validators on which the network relies. So it is unique because the underlying technology is unique based, as it is around hooks.
Wietse:
Another interesting thing is that, as opposed to how it works with Validators, for example, and they're still needed and they still definitely serve a significant purpose, if you want to join a UNL or if you're not performing and you should leave the UNL, it's not always perfectly clear and transparent on how that works. With the governance model on Xahau, with the tables, all the votes happen on the ledger. It is all public. And if someone isn't performing in the sense that the majority doesn't believe that they're actually a good steward of the ecosystem anymore, they can be voted out publicly by the other governance participants. And the other way around as well, where if there's a group of people or an individual or a company that basically pitches how they would help the technology, and if everyone believes that they're a good actor and that they actually bring something to the ecosystem, and they have a track record, right? So, if they are a great contribution to the ecosystem, they can be voted into one of those table seats as well. And again, that all happens on the ledger, and everyone already there has a say in it.
Q4. What role do organizations like XRPL Labs and Evernode play within the Xahau governance structure, and how does Xahau's governance model facilitate diversity and inclusion in decision-making and development processes?
Wietse:
Everyone has their own angle, their own perspective on what Xahau will bring, and what has to be built to make that happen. In the case of XRPL Labs, when it comes to the governance structure, it's pretty clear that as soon as someone really doesn't contribute to the ecosystem anymore, they have no place. As soon as someone comes along who really has a plan and a track record and comes up with a clear proposal of how they would contribute to the ecosystem, they could get our vote. What's important, I think, is that those entities do not only contribute in terms of discussion or auditing, asking the right questions. There should be more to it. You should do something that actually helps this technology get put to use.
For example, for XRPL Apps, we are aiming to do more retail-focused things for the next five years, to the point where we use the ledger, the XRP Ledger protocol, hopefully in five years, completely under the hood, where a lot of users use it without even realizing they're using it. But to make that happen, we have to build things that are already possible in today's custodial traditional payments world but are very hard on a digital ledger. A really good example is direct debits, which is very easy in traditional finance but is not available on the XRP Ledger protocol. And we should build those things, and then we should work with other entities who have relationships in the retail world to actually put that to use. And Evernode, for example, brings an entirely new dynamic of possibilities to the space. And from that perspective, they will have other things they value. When a proposal comes by, for example, and I think because everyone has their different view and their different potential user base or their different audiences and opportunities, what we all benefit from is the broadest possible scope to put the ledger to use, to look at the technology, et cetera. So what you'll end up with is a very diverse governance group with a layer one or a layer two seed and hopefully more reach for the technology.
Scott:
One of the things the governance structure allows for is finding a home for everyone who deserves a home. So, to the extent that there are people in the community who are active and involved and useful and adding value, it's really easy to begin the process of having them included in an L2 table. You can join an existing table. That's one really simple way that people can be embraced. That's a contrast to how it might work if you just had a DUNL. The DUNL is very hard to change, and it's a one-or-nothing sort of thing. Whereas with these L2 tables, there's always a home for everyone. And from that, you can build potentially to splitting off and having a separate table. If a table grows, or there's a need for a different theme or a different range of interests for people. And it's going to be a real big positive for Xahau going forward.
Why do we call it a Governance Game, right? It's important to understand there's no constitution, there's no rules, there's no agreements, there's no deeds, there's nothing. That is what you might otherwise think of as a board or a committee or anything like that. We call it a Governance Game because everyone who's at the table is there to play their own game. What you have to play with is a vote, how you vote, and why you vote, and all of that is simply completely up to the person who owns the vote. And when it comes to the L2 tables, there are no rules about how L2 structure themselves and how they reach their decisions. Whatever goes on between L2 participants is completely and utterly up to them. And who's on their table is completely and utterly up to them. All of this is designed so everyone is completely independent and can make their own decisions about how they cast their own vote. And that's what's called a game and not a governance board or a governance committee or something of that. You've got your vote, and you're using your vote to get what you think should be done for the ledger. Done.
Q5. With the introduction of smart contracts, what kind of impact do you anticipate on the XRPL ecosystem, and how does Xahau Ledger fit into this transformation?
Wietse:
Yes. So the most important part about Smart Contracts, I think, is that you get a blank canvas, and you can do really anything. The one thing I really like about the XRP Ledger and the XRP Ledger Protocol is the features they offer. They're native, they're well documented, and they always work the same. They have native transaction types at the same time, that's a problem when it comes to innovation. So, take any EVM chain, for example. Whatever it doesn't have in the EVM space, people can build, which happens, which did happen and is still happening because a lot of the innovation is happening in the EVM space. But at the same time, the EVM space, that composability in a way where it's not very convenient. Scott already mentioned it.
If you want to do things on a ledger that do not require all kinds of reactive hacks, I would say so. If, for example, you want a payment based on your own rules not to happen, instead of trying to revert it, then you need Smart Contracts that are part of the payment flow, part of the payment validation flow, and part of the consensus flow. And that's what Hooks brings, and the things we can do now are, one, basically unlimited, and two are, I'd say, better than what you get if you use EVM better from the perspective of putting this technology actually to use for the things we try to do on a daily basis or things that haven't been done before.
And because of this, if you are a business or a developer selecting the technology you're going to work with to create your project, you not only know that you're getting something better than, for example, in the EVM world, you're also getting something that will always work. Previously, if something weren't possible on the XRP Ledger Protocol, you'd have to code up an entire amendment and then hopefully possibly get it through the consensus process and voting process one day. And with Hooks, what you get is your own little building blocks, your own box of Legos, and whatever you're missing in the native protocol, you're going to code up yourself, add yourself, and deploy to the network straight away and then use it.
So, what you get is the certainty that you're going to be able to launch your network on the XRPL Protocol. We also get the ability to make that play nice with all the amazing native things the XRP Ledger has to offer. And then, well, that's then not on XRPL Mainnet, but on the Xahau ledger. But doing all of this, what I hope to see in the future is that whenever someone needs something, whenever innovation is happening, we can go live with it tomorrow because we can build it ourselves on the Xahau ledger. And then, as everything has been tested, as went through the stages of upgrades of that Hooks that smart contract, as we used it, as we learned that at some point when we decide that this should be a native feature and when an amendment has to be built, we're building it with much more confidence and based on something that's already battle-tested and that's already fully spec-ed out. So we're getting the best of both worlds: we're getting better technology, we're getting it now, and we can learn from it to grow the entire ecosystem in the future.
Scott:
What Xahau does is help keep and grow the developer base that understands the XRPL code base. XRPL is like alien tech compared to the rest of the blockchain ecosystem everywhere you go. XRP, even before the court case, was treated as something different because it wasn't proof of work, and it wasn't proof of stake. And so your developer base is thin compared to other chains. And the reason for that is, as we found with the research I did, it was really hard to build decentralized solutions on top of the XRP ledger. There are things that do really well, but when you issue a token on the XRP ledger, literally, it's called an issued currency. And literally, it means you're the counterparty for that asset. And it's very hard to design it in a way where you're not still that counterparty. Even if it's controlled by multi-sig wallet, those keys have still got to be somewhere, someone's still got to be responsible for them. And that's exactly the sort of dynamic that has seen notionally decentralized applications on other chains get hacked and drained of their funds, and it causes legal problems. So, it was very hard to build things where it was very hard to develop business models for decentralized applications on the XRP ledger. But with Hooks and Xahau there's a whole universe now of business models and business ideas and decentralized ideas and token ideas that developers can implement. And there's now every reason for developers. To come to the XRP ecosystem and to stay. And Xahau is a really good gymnasium for them to work out and do really interesting stuff on a chain that's cheap, fast, and secure.
So that's what I'm hoping we get out of Xahau. That's Hooks. Everything that Hooks can't do there's then Evernode, and Evernode is a different beast because it's not a blockchain in and of itself. It's a mechanism for creating bespoke blockchains or app chains. Those app chains can interact with any external service, including the XRP ledger, and other blockchains. So, there's an interoperability component that we get once Evernode exists. It really is exciting about what can be achieved once this all gets up and running. And it's been a while incoming, and it's nice to see it here.
Q6. Can you share some real-world examples or use cases where Xahau Ledger's smart contracts have demonstrated their value within the XRPL ecosystem?
Wietse:
Yeah, definitely with one small remark. I don't think they really have demonstrated that yet because we're using brand new technology on a brand new ledger out there where people can finally start to build and deploy real things. Of course, in the past years, where there was already a testnet, we've seen people build interesting things. And of course we started building this technology because we had some ideas of what we needed for, right? So I'm going just to give a couple of examples of the things we identified as things we need with XRPL Labs, with my company, to build relevant things and to make the things we want to see happen in the next five years and to actually make them happen.
And for us that goes, as I mentioned, to the way we interact with consumers and the way consumers can do business can use this technology, hopefully even without realizing that they're using this technology. So, take a consumer-focused app that the consumer can use to pay basically anywhere. So that's brick-and-mortar payments, that's online payments, that's paying for charging your car or bike. It's basically anything you need to exchange value. So let's say you have this app that allows you to spend and send payment requests and exchange value, right? Value might even be a timeshare or concert ticket or anything, really. The consumer doesn't want to use a digital ledger. The consumer just wants something that works very easily and isn't siloed.
And if you are focusing on consumer adoption, you need a very different experience from the crypto experience we have today, and that even applies to our flagship product, to Xumm, right? You're still generating a secret key, you're still importing that, you still have to keep that safe and it's just not easy enough. It might be easy enough for 100,000 crypto people, it's not easy enough for 7 billion people. And what we should all try to accomplish the next years is to build something that's very easy for 7 billion people and then abstract the digital ledger away and build it on the technology we actually believe in, which can sustain whatever future use case. And we have time to build it, right, that we can improve the technology while we're trying to get there. But you have to start out with technology that allows the things that consumers need to be much more convenient, much easier, and much safer. So that's, for example, key management, where someone has to be able to recover their account if they lose their keys. It goes to someone who has compromised keys without even knowing that they have private keys, for example, to be protected against key theft, where everything gets sent out of their account. A Hook can, for example, provide a time lock where if you want to make it too big of a transfer and transfer out all your account's value, it gets stopped. The consumer has time to review and protect their account again or confirm after a certain amount of time that it was indeed intentional to transfer everything out.
And where if you're in a store and you want to buy a cup of coffee or in a kiosk or whatever on the train platform, you want to pay for a cup of coffee where you don't even have to scan a QR code and then confirm that you want to pay for the coffee. You should authorize the kiosk to directly debit that coffee from your account up to a certain amount in a certain time. If you want to read a single news item on a news website, it's just one click and a direct debit from your account. If something happens to you and your family needs to access your account, they can do so in a trusted way, where you basically have a fully code-based notary on the ledger that decides what happens and what doesn't happen. And these are only a few simple examples. There are many more from many different perspectives. Scott already explained some of the things he needed for Evernode, and other people will have other needs, and if the ledger doesn't offer it today, they can add it to the ledger with a smart contract with a Hook.
Scott:
Yeah, I've got a lot to add on. Evernode is a very good example of some of the stuff that Hooks can do. So, for example, we have a registry hook where people who want to run a host on the Evernode network download the Evernode software, configure their host, and then ask the Hook to register their host on the network because people need to know that their host is a member of the Evernode network. So they send their registration request to the Hook along with the registration fee in EVERS. And the hook, in response, sends back a registration NFT. So it mints the NFT and sends it to them to say, hey, you are a member, and your membership details are contained in this registration NFT.
That registration NFT also controls the process by which that hook controls the process by which the registration NFT can be forcibly redeemed from the host if they prove to be a dud host and allows people to return the registration NFT in return for which they'll get back some of the EVERS they put on deposit. Now, all of that is handled by a Hook. Scott Chamberlain isn't running around the world controlling the private keys that control the account that issues registration NFTs and maintains the registry of who is an Evernode host, and that's all controlled by the Hook, so it's automated. And without that registration NFT, without that registration hook, Evernode would be hopelessly centralized at that registration point. You could take out the network just by bringing down the machine that hosts the register.
The second hook we've got is a treasury hook, which is where all the EVERS go. And then that hook emits EVERS according to a formula to every host that owns a registration NFT and has sent a heartbeat message to the hook within the previous hour. So you're a member of the Evernode network, you hold a registration NFT, you send a request for a reward to the Evernode Treasury hook and say look, I'm a live node, I'm on the network, please send me a reward. And then what the hook does, is distribute the EVERS every hour across all of the hosts who are eligible for a reward in that hour. And we've run this on the testnet for probably 18 months, almost two years now, and distributed well over 10 million worth of fake EVERS to hosts, completely reliably, completely decentralized.
And once again, this is being distributed by the Hook. It's not being distributed by a machine controlled by keys that Scott Chamberlain controls or that Richard Holland controls. It's its own thing. And that's a very promising use case for people building on the XRP ecosystem. You can now have a project, have a token, and the control of that token can be given over to a hook. And it's now effectively a counterparty-free asset. The counterparty is the hook. It's not particular people. We have a third hook that governs our Governance Game for Evernode. And the way that works is everyone who holds a registration NFT that's been validly issued by the registration hook, they get a vote. And with that vote, they can vote to update any of the hooks, the treasury hook, the registration hook, and the Governance Game hook itself. So the registration NFT is acting effectively as your right-to-vote form.
Looking broader at the sorts of use cases that can be built, I presented at Ripple's UBRI conference in Toronto just last month. Our project, Digital Cows, which is the next thing we will work on once Evernode is launched. And that's a system that allows for trading in fractional interests in the sale price of Australian cattle. So it allows farmers to scan the RFID ear tag of their cow, load that cow onto the ledger, grab a whole bunch of cows that are similar into a herd, turn that herd into a cryptographic vault, and then from that vault, mint tokens that represent a right to share in the sale price of any of the cows from that vault. And then those sale tokens trade on the decks, allowing hedge funds and others, people that want exposure to beef prices, to be able to get exposure to beef prices by buying this fractional entitlement to the sale price. One of the things we need for that system to work is a stablecoin. One of the things stablecoins need to work on is this smart contract functionality that lets the issuer have some sort of say over how their money gets spent and who gets to spend it. So, Digital Cows is a use case. It uses the Evernode technology because all of the information about the cow and the cow NFT will be stored on a decentralized network of Evernode nodes in a cluster. But the assets themselves will exist on the Xahau ledger even further afield.
The team that has helped build Evernode's technology Geveo it's got a demo of a use case it calls Voyage Lanka, which is a decentralized hotel booking service. It's basically booking.com without booking.com in the middle, right? You take the booking.com out and replace it with a smart contract. Hotels join the network by running a node, and they then have hotel access to a hotel booking site that looks almost exactly like booking.com, except it only charges them 2%, which goes back to the developer, rather than the 30% that booking.com charges. They recently also had a hackathon internally, and one of the projects that arose from that hackathon was a decentralized system for tracking the provenance of organic food for Australia into Asia. There's a big premium placed on certain types of Australian agriculture because of its cleanliness, particularly in China, and being able to prove that in a decentralized way is important. And that project is moving forward and may even be on the cusp of funding. So, there is a huge universe. And finally, at the ANU, we're still in the early stages of a project that's looking at using the Evernode and Xahau technology to tokenize Aboriginal art and tokenize it in such a way that the artist gets a guaranteed percentage of the future sale price of their art, not just a one-off sale price when it's sold by the gallery. They're the sorts of things that can be built with this technology going forward.
Q7. Smart contracts are a significant development in the blockchain space. How can XRPL enthusiasts, developers, and other stakeholders actively engage with Xahau Ledger and contribute to its growth and development?
Wietse:
Many different entities and people and companies and developers can do many different things. I would say. If you are, for example, Bitrue, if you are an exchange, look at the technology and see how you can make your processes more convenient for end users, for yourself, and for your support department. I shared a Tweet the other day with an idea, actually, from another exchange, where they realized that they could leverage hooks to fix destination tag deposit problems, actually for their users and for their own support department, and be more compliant in the process, where a hook could help them guard their hot wallet against deposits that were incorrect. And if your developers build anything, really, because you get this blank canvas and you can do anything with it, which is interesting products on ledger when it comes to how you deal with tokens and the decks or NFTs or anything and find but that's mostly something I'm very enthusiastic about. Find things in the real world around us and implement them in a smart way on the ledger because you have composability right now. If you are a developer and you just want to learn how to use hooks, use the Builder. There is a Builder online. All of this information is, by the way, on the website xahau.network. But use the builder to build hooks, dive into documentations, ask questions, and there will be a GateHub repository as well, with discussions where people can ask questions, propose things, build DApps, and leverage the new features available to you.
Scott:
If you're a builder, come and build hooks there it exists once Evernode exists. The benefit of Evernode is that its technology is such that you can build your contracts in any language that runs on a Linux machine. So, the range of developers that can make use of that technology is vast. It's not Solidity, it's not C++. It can be a whole wide range of languages that people most commonly use. If you've dreamed about it, Evernode plus Hooks will likely enable you to do it.
Q8. How will the collaboration between Xahau Network and Bitrue help promote the adoption of Xahau Network's native token, XAH, and what does it mean for us users?
Wietse:
So let me start by stating that in no way does the Xahau network, the previous launch alliance, or anyone involved actually have an incentive or a goal to push the native asset, XAH, token. It isn't about the token, it's about the technology, the new technology, and the features it brings. To use those features on the Xahau ledger, you need some of the native assets to pay for network fees. So it's a gas token in that sense. If people want to bring speculation into the space, which they obviously will do, then good for them. But no one involved, none of the developers, none of the people building on this technology actually are in this space or have developed any of this for people to speculate on the token. What is important is that if you want to use the network and its features, if you want to interact with smart contracts if you want to build new things, and if you are a user who wants to use those things, you're going to need just a little bit of the native assets, XAH, to pay for basically contract execution, to get a transaction processed by the network, just like on the XRP ledger, where you spend for example, 12 XRP to get a transaction through, and where you have an account reserve and an object reserve.
The same thing applies to the Xahau Network, Xahau Ledger, except if you are sending from an account that has Hooks installed, or you're sending to an account that has Hooks installed, or both, you're going to pay slightly higher fees because someone has to pay for the extra resources consumed on the ledger. And it wouldn't be really clever to have the recipient pay for that because that would mean there's an attack vector that people can just spam an account and make that account pay for all the resources consumed. So the sender pays, and the sender pays more if the network has to do a little bit more computations.
What Bitrue, or basically any secondary market, offers to this space is that there's the native Burn2Mint method where you can take some XRP, burn it, and get some XAH in return. But that's just one way. And what exchanges offer is a secondary market that allows for both ways, both directions. So preferably, people will only burn the XRP they are actually intending to use on the Xahau ledger. Now, if you think you are going to use a certain amount of XRP and at some point, you realize you don't, then it's good that there's an exchange to make the trade back into XRP if you would like that. Or the other way around. Maybe too many people want to go back. And then it might be more interesting for someone who wants to use the features on the Xahau ledger if they just obtain it on a secondary market where they get more XAH in return for their XRP than if they just burn it. So, I’d say it's an alternative way for people to obtain XAH if they want to use the network.
You can compare it with bus tickets. For example, if you know, you're going to ride the bus every day and you know that you're going to need the tickets anyway, you might not want to wait in line to obtain those tickets every day. You're just going to buy an X number of bus tickets, so you already have them. And then, at some point if you decide to take the bike instead of the bus, you're going to end up with a bunch of bus tickets you already bought, and you might want to get rid of them again. And that's basically what happens on exchanges.
Scott:
Well, firstly, Evernode is very grateful for Bitrue's support. You guys have supported our airrop for XRP holders, and when we announced and configured our airdrop we didn't think there'd be any exchanges interested in supporting the Token, and we're thankful that you did. We look forward to the airdrop happening and running smoothly. Exchanges perform a very important role in this entire space, and it's underappreciated. There is this whole thing about “not your keys, not your asset”, and there's also this thing about, you know, doing everything completely decentralized, but I think we've seen that some of these so-called decentralized bridges aren't really decentralized and they're not really very secure.
The lawyer in me and the legal academic in me can see that we're moving to a universe where the most logical bridge between various assets is, in fact, a centralized exchange. And in fact, that's the best way to think about centralized exchanges as the bridge. They're what allows you to have an asset you don't want and trade it for an asset that you do want. For whatever reason you want those assets. In the case of Evernode, it'll be important for people to be able to access the EVERS that they need to use the Evernode network. And the same is true for Xahau and the same is true for the entire XRP ecosystem. If you're holding XRP, but you'd rather have an asset that's on a side chain, one very good way of being able to access that asset is through a centralized exchange rather than through potentially decentralized mechanisms.
Q9. What is the roadmap for Xahau Ledger's continued development, and what exciting features or advancements can we look forward to in the near future within the XRPL ecosystem?
Wietse:
What you'll see is some nice discussions on GateHub. For example, developers who are trying the technology, asking the right questions, and coming up with requests. There will be more tooling. Tooling is very limited today. If you are a C developer, you can dive right in, but most people in the space aren't C developers. We will try to find ways to get more dev-friendly tools out there, and we'll see people actually building things. So DApps accepts, we'll see wallets collaborating, making it very clear to users what's happening with a Hook. I think this is something that never really happened in a good way in the EVM ecosystem, where users interact with a smart contract, and they don't really know what they're about to do. It's a bit of the “trust me, bro” interaction with smart contracts.
We need to do better, and we can do better. So I'm having, for example, really nice conversations with the developer of Crossmark. And we're going to align on how we can explain to users what they're about to do in their wallet, whether that's Xumm or Crossmark or, in the future, other wallets to see to explain what's going to happen if they execute a transaction in a transaction history. To explain what happened and how smart contracts, how a hook influenced the transaction outcome. So more tools for developers, tools for users to understand this technology. We're going to build the things we wanted to build for retail use cases. So we're definitely going to have a pilot here and there and put this to the test, and we hope to receive a lot of input. And then of course, there's the Evernode project going live. I know other developers who are already building their things to leverage Hooks. So I think we're going to see a lot of new ideas and new proposals and new implementations of very exciting things where native features from the ledger are being used in very creative and new ways. And I hope that all the builders will actually build, and I hope that all the users will be presented with reasons to use this technology because they benefit in a way.
Scott:
Again, the difference in the Governance Game, right? There's no roadmap, certainly not like Ethereum, where there's a bunch of things named after capital cities. What I think is, there is a bunch of things that people would like to see, a bunch of nice to haves, and certainly, from the developer's point of view, those guys are more aware of what's not there than some of the rest of us. From my perspective, the really big exciting thing coming up is Evernode, and then after that, it's everything that can be built. From my perspective, the projects that I want to work on, the tech that those projects need, will all exist once Evernode exists. And there are not any new and exciting things that I'm waiting on from the Xahau ledger community for it to happen.
And honestly, that's part of the deal with having composability now that you've got hooks, and soon Evernode, if you want to do it, you'll be able to do it. You won't be waiting for massive updates from some centralized group of devs or anything like that. You'll be able to go out and do it and make it happen. And I'm really excited to see what things people make happen because I'm pretty sure that's how it will work. Someone that you didn't even know was doing something suddenly comes out with this fully born brand new idea or brand new tool or brand new something. And that's the thing to look forward to over the next sort of twelve to 18 months.
About Bitrue
Founded in 2018, Bitrue is one of the world’s most advanced cryptocurrency exchanges and management platforms. Bitrue employs blockchain and emerging technologies that enable access to an expansive suite of crypto products, options, and services.
As a digital assets trading platform, Bitrue operates with globalization, specialization, and diversification at its core. Bitrue’s mission is to become a key player in making blockchain and digital assets infrastructure available to everyone by enabling users to buy, sell and invest in more than 700 cryptocurrencies.