Ripple's former director of developer relations, Matt Hamilton, has revealed some details about upcoming innovations to XRP Ledger. In particular, Hamilton said that the blockchain will soon feature smart contracts, which are currently in development.
Well, most functionality needed (fungible tokens, NFTs, escrows, multisig, DEX) are all built in.
— Matt Hamilton (@HammerToe) December 22, 2022
But yes, smart contracts are in development
Otherwise, XRP Ledger has all the functionality the industry needs today, from NFT to decentralized exchanges, the former Ripple director said. Hamilton's remarks came during another round of controversy surrounding XRP and the ecosystem around the token.
In fact, talks about smart contracts on XRPL are not new, and U.Today has previously reported on various moves in this regard.
Smart contracts on XRP Ledger as of now
The latest news on the topic was the achievement by Evernode, a developer of a kind of Layer 2 smart contract solution for XRPL, in the beta version of its network. The solution was implemented directly using Hooks, amendments adding smart contract functionality to XRP Ledger.
As small embedded pieces of software code, Hooks allows developers to monitor and define transaction behavior and flow, and to perform other logic at any point in the "life" of a transaction.
In the early autumn of this year, there were doubts about how soon the proposal to fully implement Hooks would be accepted. However, if we view Hamilton's words positively, the community should soon have a more accurate picture of what is going on with smart contracts at XRPL.