XRP Ledger Sidechains Now Available for Testing on New Devnet

Developers can now explore the new XRPL sidechains design. 

XRP Ledger sidechains are now available for testing on a new developers network (Devnet), as disclosed by RippleX in a tweet yesterday.

Can we get a witness (server)?! ? The new #XRPL Sidechains Devnet is now available for testing and development.

Check out the technical documentation to learn more and get started unlocking? new use cases today. #BuiltOnXRPL https://t.co/B0lZDunUmI

— RippleX (@RippleXDev) March 29, 2023

It comes as developers have completed documentation for the new sidechains design.

“After testing and reviewing community feedback from the preview, the implementation, spec and documentation of that design (XLS-38d) are now complete and ready for review and testing,” Mayukha Vadari wrote on behalf of Ripple developers. “A new Devnet is also available for sidechains-related testing.”

Consequently, with the launch of the new Devnet, RippleX has urged interested developers to join the discussion on GitHub, review the documentation, and explore the Devnet.

XRPL sidechains allow developers to customize the XRPL for their desired use cases. It can also be used as a sandbox to test new features that could be implemented on the main network (mainnet). The groundbreaking feature could see increased XRP adoption as interested businesses could customize the XRPL for private needs.

Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer and one of the original architects of the XRPL, David Schwartz, first proposed the idea of federated sidechains for the XRPL in 2021. However, developers opted to redesign the feature in 2022 to factor in feedback from a months-long preview period. 

Notably, developers replaced the “federator” – a software intended to connect one or more sidechains to the XRPL – with “witness.”

“Witness servers introduce more simplicity for developers wanting to get started with sidechains,” developers said in a September blog post.

It moves developers from a system where “servers depend on a shared global state between servers to one where servers act independently,” they added. Consequently, the new design is touted as more robust as it promises to simplify the process of testing and debugging.

Sidechains is one of the many projects the team dedicated to building infrastructure and tools for the XRPL is working on. As often highlighted in reports, RippleX is also working on a native automated market maker (AMM) and an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible sidechain for the XRPL. All of these are already available for testing.