The XRP Ledger (XRPL) continues its journey toward the deployment of programmable escrow features as developers just deployed the ninth release of the Smart Escrow Devnet.
Mayukha Vadari, a senior software engineer at RippleX and one of the authors of the Smart Escrows proposal, said it’s a “big step toward launch.” She added that they are still in the process of reviewing and testing the Smart Escrows framework before the release.
“Programmability on the XRPL keeps moving,” said Vadari.
Those who are trying out the Smart Escrow tech would need to update their configurations for the new Devnet.
Big tech overhaul
The ninth release includes a lot of under-the-hood changes. One of the key changes in this release is the full migration of the WebAssembly virtual machine integration from C++ to Rust.
Vadari said this new architecture brings a single point of entry for gas accounting, error handling, and checks. Moreover, this migration improved performance by 30%–50% for every host function call.
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In addition, the developers also updated the names of host functions, fields in the ledger, result codes for the transaction engine, and the entry point for execution with production-ready names.
Smart Escrow explained
The standard XRPL escrows allow users to lock funds for a certain period of time or wait until some cryptographic condition is met. With Smart Escrow, you can add a small WebAssembly program to the escrow itself.
This program can decide whether to allow the escrow to complete. This gives the opportunity to have much more complex release conditions.
As described in the XLS-100 proposal, Smart Escrows is the initial layer of programmability for the XRP Ledger. Possible use cases for Smart Escrows could include approvals from a notary, holding for compliance reasons, real estate deals, auctions, and other conditional peer-to-peer arrangements.
In theory, the assets can only be released from the escrow if some approval is entered, if some compliance check is fulfilled, or if some external information is provided via an oracle that satisfies certain criteria.
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