XRP Ledger Finally Ships Programmability Three Years After Fork
The XRP Ledger is finally shipping its own programmability layer, three years after developers forked it to create Xahau due to the validators' refusal to adopt smart contracts. The draft specification for XLS-101d Smart Contracts explicitly names Hooks and the Ethereum Virtual Machine as influences.
Xahau was launched in 2023 with its own token, validator set, and governance system, which is different from the parent chain's NFT implementation and allows for a balance-rewards mechanism that has no equivalent on the XRP Ledger. The fork was contentious, but it accumulated a working developer story around a capability the main ledger did not have.
The XRP Ledger's current roadmap describes a different route to programmability, with WebAssembly-based Smart Escrows and conditional logic to escrow objects. This is a narrow, payments-native form of programmability, unlike general computing environments. The choice of WebAssembly instead of a bespoke virtual machine imports an existing toolchain and developer base.
The Xahau team rejects the sidechain framing, positioning itself as an independent Layer 1 that diverged in its own direction with features the parent lacks and vice versa. This complicates the story and challenges the narrative that a parent chain has absorbed the innovation of its fork.