This post was originally published on Bitcoinist
On September 2, Ripple announced ongoing plans to introduce native smart contracts to the XRP Ledger (XRPL) mainnet. Some members of the XRPL developer community haven’t taken this announcement kindly, especially the Director of XRPL Labs, Wietse Wind, who wrote an open letter to Ripple.
The Sudden Change To XRPL Smart Contracts Is “Surprising”
Wind mentioned in the open letter on the X (formerly Twitter) platform that the sudden change in Ripple’s stance about introducing native smart contracts is surprising. He noted that three mongs ago, Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) David Schwartz had made it clear at the XRP Ledger Apex that there was no room for smart contracts on the XRP Ledger.
Back then, Schwartz mentioned that the XRPL mainnet was a “fixed function ledger” and that smart contracts belonged on other networks such as the EVM Sidechain and Xahua. Wind remarked that Ripple’s turnaround makes it hard to sustainably grow the thriving ecosystem with such “whimsical pivots by the organization consistently pushing for the direction of the core protocol.”
The Director of XRPL Labs further stated that the lack of direct communication from Ripple’s leadership about this pivotal change in stance and the reasons for it is
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