Crypto tribalism has been a thorn in the industry’s flesh for quite some time now. This toxic tribalism has been holding back the cryptocurrency industry as proponents of the different visions of bitcoin spend too much time attacking each other instead of doing real work. Fortunately, not everyone wants this to continue.
Last weekend, developers and enthusiasts alike attended the three-day ETH Denver Hackathon that was held in Denver, Colorado. Surprisingly enough, members of Ripple’s Xpring also attended the ethereum-centric hackathon, which is notably the largest ETH hackathon in the US. In fact, Xpring sponsored the hackathon. Why? You may ask. Well, Xpring’s Warren Paul Anderson published an in-depth blog post explaining the rationale behind this move.
Curious what @Ripple was doing at @EthereumDenver? Hint: #XRP
— Xpring (@XpringDev) February 21, 2020#ETH https://t.co/le86x2VNDH
Xpring’s Idea For Interoperability Between Ethereum And XRP
In the blog post, Anderson notes that Xpring sponsored the ETH Denver hackathon because it mainly builds open-source software and protocol and developers in this team love to work with others that do the same. As a matter of fact, all the 40 developers of Xpring spend most of their time developing open-source software.
Moreover, Xpring supports open-source projects such as the C++(Rippled) implementation of the XRP ledger, Rust and Java implementations of the Interledger Protocol and others. The post also noted that Ripple developers believe interoperability between blockchains is very important for cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology to achieve mass adoption.
As such, Xpring sponsored three challenges during a virtual hackathon on Ethereum’s Gitcoin prior to ETH Denver. All three challenges focus on building a bridge between XRP Ledger (XRP) and Ethereum (ETH) through the InterLedger Protocol (ILP).
Why The Bridge Between XRP And Ethereum Is Important
Anderson pointed out that the Ethereum community recently came up with the mission to hit 1 million developers globally. Further, he opined that so as to achieve this goal faster, it would make much more sense to combine efforts and resources with other platforms in order to allow developers to easily build on blockchain.
In addition to that, he also observed that the XRP to ETH and ERC-20 tokens bridge is key because “XRP is one of the most liquid cryptocurrencies in the world, but doesn’t have a compute layer to support complex smart contracts for the growing Decentralized Finance (DeFi) market on Ethereum”.
Moreover, Xpring’s idea to bridge blockchains is a huge step towards eliminating crypto tribalism that exists in the cryptocurrency industry. A more united front amongst all blockchain supporters will not only foster mainstream adoption but also help create a more constructive approach towards crypto regulation.
In short, as Ripple CTO David Schwartz quipped, building bridges between blockchains is way better than building walls.
