XRP Ledger Developers Unveil New Proposal for Cross-Chain Bridge To Expand Blockchain’s Use Cases

XRP Ledger (XRPL) developers have unveiled a new proposal for a cross-chain bridge they say would expand the blockchain’s functionality.

Ripple software engineer Mayukha Vadari published the GitHub proposal and linked to it on Twitter.

We just published an official XRPL Standards spec for cross-chain bridges! Check it out and let me know if you have any thoughts ? https://t.co/9UvuCTxEvN

— Mayukha Vadari (@msvadari) February 22, 2023

Cross-chain bridges are designed to functionally enable transfers of crypto assets between two different chains.

Explains Vadari,

“A bridge does not exchange assets between two ledgers. Instead, it locks assets on one ledger (the ‘locking chain’) and represents those assets with wrapped assets on another chain (the ‘issuing chain’). A good model to keep in mind is a box with an infinite supply of wrapped assets.

Putting an asset from the locking chain into the box will release a wrapped asset onto the issuing chain. Putting a wrapped asset from the issuing chain back into the box will release one of the existing locking chain assets back onto the locking chain. There is no other way to get assets into or out of the box. Note that there is no way for the box to ‘run out of’ wrapped assets — it has an infinite supply.”

Emi Yoshikawa, the vice president of strategy and operations at Ripple, says the proposal “would significantly expand potential use cases for XRPL.”

XRP is worth $0.387 at time of writing. The 6th-ranked crypto asset by market cap is down around 1.5% in the past 24 hours and more than 3% in the past seven days.

XRP is also down more than 88.5% from its all-time high of $3.40, which it hit all the way back in January 2018.

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