During the 19th 'Ripple Drop' episode, David Schwartz, the CTO of blockchain company Ripple, has touched upon numerous improvements to the XRP Ledger.
New features
Schwartz, who has been working on at Ripple Labs for over nine years, says that the XRP Ledger has drastically changed over this period of time.
From the get-go, they only used the ledger to allow performing transactions almost instantaneously. Then, they moved to other use cases (e.g., a decentralized exchange).
"We put all that together in a functioning system probably in mid-2012."
Speaking of new amendments, he mentioned that they fall into such categories as core consensus improvements and new features such as the ability to issue stablecoins and any assets 'pegged to some external value.'
Slow evolution
Schwartz noted that it wasn't as easy as they had initially thought to implement new features. For example, Oracle can simply update its software. However, this is not the case with decentralized networks that require everyone to comply with new rules.
"If the rules change, people have to run software with new rules."
This essentially explains why Bitcoin or XRPL are not quick to adopt significant changes.
Yuri Molchan
Gamza Khanzadaev