Prominent XRPL Labs developer Wietse Wind has shared the positive news that the team is currently testing the upcoming 2.4.0 XummWallet release internally. Xumm is a noncustodial client (wallet) for XRP Ledger, which supports XRP and the 8000+ tokens issued on the XRPL.
According to him, the upcoming “big release” would contain a feature that would expose one of XRPL’s superpowers: pathfinding. This would not be an xApp, but pathfinding would be a native feature for all payment sign requests. xApps are web apps embedded in XUMM for a great user experience.
It would enable users to “pay with anything,” Wietse said as he shared a screen recording of an early beta version of the release.
Wietse reiterates that pathfinding has been a part of the XRP Ledger for a long time and has remained underutilized. He noted that this was needed for retail use cases.
“A funny (and sad) fact is that this specific feature is part of the XRP Ledger for a long time and never really got the love it deserves. We will change that. This is exactly what we need for retail use cases. The retailer wants you to pay, e.g., 20 USD. You can pay with anything,” he wrote.
Payments can be efficiently routed using the autobridging and pathfinding capabilities included in XRPL, which may use XRP as a neutral bridge asset. Using pathfinding, payments can be made in a single transaction even if the sender has a different token than the one the receiver desires.
Retail use cases for Xumm include micropayments, loyalty points and easy webshop checkout procedures.
Responding to a user who asked when the XUMM wallet desktop or browser version would launch, Wietse answered, “We won’t build one.” The XRPL Labs team decided not to ship a desktop client, citing as reasons that desktop environments are harder to keep secure, more easily compromised (keyloggers, viruses) and “less personal” than a phone.
