RippleX, the open platform that supports the growth of XRPL and its ecosystem, has announced that XRP Ledger Sidechains are now available on a new devnet.
David Schwartz, chief technology officer at Ripple, previously presented a vision for federated sidechains, an innovation that would allow developers to customize the XRP Ledger (XRPL) to suit their use case's requirements or create and test new features that, if successful, could be added to the mainnet.
Over the past year, federated sidechains have become accessible in preview mode, allowing developers to test out the transfer of assets like the native XRP of XRP Ledger from the "main" XRPL to a "sidechain."
The next iteration of XRPL sidechains with a new design was then unveiled by Ripple engineers after testing and reviewing community comments from the preview.
In the XLS 38d proposal from last year, RippleX developers provided information on the new sidechain design for the XRP Ledger.
The implementation, specification and documentation of that design (XLS-38d) are now finished and prepared for review and testing after being put through testing and taking into account community comments from the preview. Additionally, a new devnet is available for testing sidechains.
According to a blog post, XRPL sidechain support is now available for testing and initial application development.
It bears mentioning that in October 2022, Peersyst announced the release of EVM sidechain for XRPL on devnet in its first phase, bringing existing Solidity-based smart contracts written for EVM-compatible chains to XRPL.
As it advances its roadmap for XRPL sidechains, RippleX promises to inform its community of any new developments.