Ripple Creates Private Version Of XRP Ledger To Support Central Banks

Ripple, a notable blockchain company based in San Francisco, has recently announced an interesting new development. This development is the testing of a brand new private version of XRP Ledger, one developed wholly to support central banks in the ongoing struggles of issuing a central bank digital currency, or CBDC.

An important note that the company made is that this new CBDC Private Ledger will primarily be used as a means for payments.

Privacy Is King For Centralized Entities

The official announcement detailed how XRP Ledger’s blockchain will be used as a reference in the development of the CBDC Private Ledger’s own blockchain. Another key aspect that Ripple highlighted was the fact that CBDCs, in general, are seeing a large growth in interest globally, warning that the rollout of the first CBDC is more of an inevitability at this point.

Ripple highlighted that most blockchains boast public ledgers, which apparently isn’t what central banks need in the slightest. Ripple claimed that central banks really do need to hide their actions from the public, highlighting that such a private network would be ideal for the issuance and management of CBDCs.

It should be noted that XRP Ledger has been rather successful, having issued a number of digital currencies within its blockchain throughout these past few years.

The Mandatory Self Praise

The official statement from Ripple practically tripped over itself to sing this new technology’s praises. The company highlighted how moving money will reliable, near-instantaneous, and cost-effective. Further praises for its own technology came by highlighting how this new Private Ledger will be capable of handling the sheer volumes a Central Bank would need to keep an entire country’s money flowing.

According to the announcement, this new CBDC Private Ledger will be capable of handling tens of thousands of transactions every second, though it boasts to handle hundreds of thousands within the same time frame should proper scaling be in order.

The announcement revealed that the same consensus protocol used by XRP Ledger will be used with this CBDC Private Ledger in order to verify transactions.

This, when compared to the stock and standard (And obviously inefficient) baseline of proof-of-work algorithms, looks absolutely fantastic. Compared to that baseline, the algorithm uses far less energy and boasts an efficiency 61,000 times better than it.

Ripple Still Being Ripple

Ripple is still having some hiccups from a legal perspective, however. It was in December of 2020 when Ripple Labs, and its executives, were hit by a lawsuit by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. The SEC’s lawsuits claimed that Ripple had been selling unregistered securities.

As one would imagine, this didn’t do any good for the price of XRP, and the token saw a drop of 60% in value. Some people out there even thought that the lawsuit was the coffin nail long-since looming over RIpple’s head, but it appears not to be so.