The Ripple and Peersyst-developed XRPL EVM sidechain has been included in a new version of devnet. In October of last year, the first iteration of the EVM sidechain for the XRP Ledger (XRPL) was made available on devnet.
The EVM sidechain employs a proof-of-authority (PoA) consensus process and gives developers access to XRP liquidity and a bridge to XRP Ledger while enabling them to iterate on their projects and apps more quickly and use well-liked smart contract languages like Solidity.
On June 26, RippleX, the group in charge of XRPL development and maintenance, announced that a new version of devnet (v2) now includes the EVM sidechain.
The XRP Ledger, IOU, and ERC-20 token transfers in both ways between the XRP Ledger and the EVM sidechain are supported by this new version’s decentralised bridge architecture, which is based on the XLS-38d standard.
A PoA validator election method has also been included, along with a block time reduction from 5.4 to 3.5 seconds per block and upgrades to Tendermint and the Comet BFT consensus algorithm to improve chain performance.
The inclusion of functionality to bridge ERC-20 and IOU tokens, the construction of a Witness Bridge to now use XChain transactions to natively secure bridge transfers between XRPL and the sidechain with XLS-38d, and faucet support to assist onboarding (for XRP and tokens), are a few more.
Next steps
The original iteration of the EVM sidechain will be discontinued within the next month, according to a blog post.
The EVM sidechain will undergo a security assessment in July, the results of which will be made available for the community to review. Any difficulties will be handled properly by Peersyst and Ripple, and the community will be informed of their progress.
The XLS-38d bridge amendment’s adoption will likely result in the EVM sidechain being live on the mainnet. The change must be suggested, then at least 80% of the XRPL validator community must agree to it and support it for at least two weeks before the bridge may be built.
