David Schwartz, CTO of Ripple, recently spoke about where the XRP ledger started and where it is now.  He stated that he has been with Ripple XRP since 2011, but feels like it has been with it forever. He noted that the changes have been drastic over the years.

All we had was the ability to perform a transaction on a decentralized ledger in just a couple of seconds.  We just realized that the properties of the algorithms we developed allow us to do things like a decentralized exchange. Then we had this idea to issue assets and ideas like community credit, and we put all that together into a functional system probably in the mid of 2012.

Ripple XRP – David Schwartz on Importance of Robustness

Why is robustness so important today? We have to realize that we are talking about billions of dollars in a system that does not have an administrator. There is nobody that you can go to if it messes up.  Therefore, reliability is the number one property.  And, it means that these systems are very slow to develop and evolve. Any change in a system like this imposes costs on everybody who is using the system.

In the earlier days, before I was working on the XRP ledger and I was looking at bitcoin, I would sort of have this idea that any new feature, Bitcoin, would adopt it. We now know that it is hopelessly naïve.

Sydney Ifergan, the crypto expert, tweeted:  “Ripple XRP David Schwartz recollects how hopelessly naïve it is to believe that any new feature is easy to adopt.  True.  Change is hard to take. Indeed, a change affects the whole lot of them using it.”

With any other piece of software, a company will release a new version of the software. It will say to people who are working on mission-critical projects don’t upgrade to the latest version (or) use the current version, give us little time, or test it whatever. You can’t do that on a public blockchain. If the rules change, people are not comfortable if you ask why there are no new features very often, that is why.

Ripple XRP – Why liquidity is Down with Stable Coins

Proof of work is a kind of technological data; it works fine, not saying it does not work. I am saying there has not been any significant innovation.  There are also changes in the form of new features.  One of the features that I think is very exciting is the feature that will allow people to launch stable coins as an obvious use case. It is not just stable coins; it is just assets pegged to some value.  Features similar to that exist on other systems, but the exciting thing about this is that the liquidity is down.