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A Vision for Federated Sidechains on the XRP Ledger

Matt Hamilton on June 07, 2021

Today, RippleX is rolling out a community page on DEV aimed at engaging the growing XRP Ledger Community. Our inaugural post was written by David ...
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FrancisBovineSwift

So, I could isolate an instance on the XRPL on my home network, tie a main wallet to the interface to the public XRPL. I could then issue no fee wallets internally that represent various aspects of my budget. (Mortgage, food, medical, clothing, etc)
In the (hopefully) near future when I can seamlessly interchange XRP for XUSD(US Fed XRP based CBDC), I can pay with my XUMM app that is tied to my external wallet with memos that are automatically filed in the correct budget line items as my internal implementation of XRPL is notified of external purchases.
I know, kind of a mundane implementation, but it is a free engine for home budgeting, and who has their budget history on a blockchain?
This could come in handy come tax time.... Itemize medical expenses, child care, etc...

Just a thought.

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FrancisBovineSwift

Just need to have something read the memos and file the purchases to the correct internal wallets, or manually sort things that are not clearly defined...

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Matt Hamilton

It would certainly be possible. Although I'd probably say running your own sidechain might be overkill for just yourself!

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FrancisBovineSwift

Just spit balling at the moment. This opens a lot of potential. I thought a little more about it, and really, any organization could create an internal currency and maintain records on their own ledger, using a common external wallet for outside transactions.

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Matt Hamilton

Correct. Which is pretty much what any centralised exchange (Coinbase, Kraken, etc) do. Just in this case "their own ledger" would be an instance of the XRP Ledger code running privately.

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FrancisBovineSwift

Wow! This is amazing. It seems like this will empower the advancement of CBDC's being able to either issue their token on the XRPL or on their own clone of the XRPL and seamlessly interact with the Mainnet.
I thought it was a bad idea to issue NFTs and Hooks on the Ledger. This solves both those issues. Just clone rippled and build the solution there.

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Matt Hamilton • Edited

Exactly, this enables a bank to run a "private" network of rippled instances to issue their CBDC on and then connect that to the main public XRPL.

related: ripple.com/insights/ripple-pilots-...

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HAKWE

Thanks Matt and David for the great work, We are building an e-commerce site for an unbanked market. Could we use the side chain to create our own tokens and have our own smart contracts and still be able to exchange our native tokens with xrp?

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Matt Hamilton

Yes, you could do that.

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Arka Rudjito

I have a quick question. Does it mean Ripple is building interoperability in its own ecosystem? Is it possible that this sidechain will connect XRPL with another blockchain?

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Arka Rudjito

Wow, I appreciate you Matt. Thanks for the explanation.

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we are the minerals • Edited

Hopefully one day someone will create a side chain that tokenized movie funding, to help fund indie movies. It would really help the entertainment industry and its struggling talent work on amazing projects. Imagine being able to read a script and invest in it and it rackes in hundreds of millions and also has royalties you’re also entitled to. Kinda sounds like a security but I’m sure there’s a way to structure it so it’s not.

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Matt Hamilton

That wouldn't ned a side chain. You could just use the main XRP Ledger to do that. Sounds like a very interesting idea. I know that Coil were looking at similar and I think funded a feature length film as part of Grant for the Web.

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we are the minerals

There’s so much opportunity in films and series that I really think decentralization would help really good ideas be executed and not have a fast and the furious 17. Hopefully aslo help the vfx industry get compensated better by having them be eligible to tokens because they worked on the projects.

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Ben Halpern

This is interesting. I'll be following.

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Matt Hamilton

Hi Ben! Thanks :) And great work on dev.to and Forem! I'm very much a fan on what you have been creating!

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Deon Bakkes

[Note: I also posted something similar to this on the "0020 XLS-20d Non-Fungible Token Support (native)" Github discussion. I'm trying to explore different options for my idea - which I really want running on the XRPL.]

I'm curious about federated side chains, because I'm currently working on a science/business idea using something like 'fractional NFTs'.

I realise this may sound somewhat confusing, as NFTs are by their nature 'indivisible', but I think it's at least conceptually possible if we flip the concept upside-down.

Essentially, I'm referring to minting NFTs for elements of a piece (e.g. pixels of an image) and then grouping them together as a set of NFTs. This could allow for fractional ownership and trading of especially valuable NFTs. This could be quite valuable as it wouldn't exclude anyone based on their financial resources (in the same way fractional shares open up the stock market to a wider range of people).

Could a specialised side chain be capable of issuing copious amounts of NFTs that could then be linked to represent a group of NFTs (tied to a particular object)? So basically a number of 'supra-NFTs' with nested 'sub-NFTs'.

I asked about this on the 0020 XLS-20d Github discussion... but I fear the amount of NFTs my project idea would need to issue will get out of hand very quickly because of the the reserve requirement. i.e. minting 'sub-NFTs' for a 1080x1920 image (2 073 600 pixels) would require 64 800 NFToken pages and 324 000 XRP (at reserve=5 XRP).

Is a specialised side chain a possible way to solve this?

I'm probably being a little unreasonable... but I just really want 'fractional NFTs'... haha

Please bear in mind, I am also a total noob. I have zero experience in blockchain technology and only some experience in scripting for data analysis in R and python.

Thanks a lot
Cheers!

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Calvin Schultz

Look forward to this, opens the doors to new developments in general.
Do we know when demo/code will be posted, some boiler plate for testing?

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Matt Hamilton

"soon". I'm hoping to get David and one of the other Ripple engineers that has been working on it on the Twitch stream.

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Corey Kreiniker

Brilliant! I hope they have adequate quality control management because I've experienced some bad side effects from 'trivial' code changes in the past. But then again, David's sense of something being trivial is probably the equivalent to my professors when they skip through some lecture slides that still require some elbow-grease to decipher.

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Danny Aranda • Edited

Is there any shared security from XRPL main net or does each sidechain have its own security assumptions depending on its validator set?

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Matt Hamilton

Each sidechain is completely independant and has its own security assumptions based on its own validator set.

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Danny Aranda

Thx and understood. Is a shared trust model something RippleX considered or is researching? Advantage is that security isn't starting from scratch.