Good old Codius reactivated, just not by name?

During Stefan Thomas’ time as Ripple CTO, he came up with the idea for Codius, a project he announced in its white paper in 2014. This paper talked about smart contracts, and it laid the groundwork for Codius. What’s interesting is that the idea partly came from conversations between Stefan Thomas and Vitalik Buterin, who was a Ripple intern at the time. Vitalik crashed at Stefan’s place for a few weeks in 2013. Later on, Vitalik started Ethereum, now one of the most well-known blockchains using smart contracts.

Only a year ago Ripple’s current CTO David Schwarz posted that he was still trying to revive Codius.

I'm still trying to revive it! The technological pieces we were missing exist now and I think there are some demonstrated market needs that it can address. I wish I could say more but this is probably more than I should be sharing.

— David "JoelKatz" Schwartz (@JoelKatz) August 14, 2023

Now, Ripple is advancing a commitment to the XRP Ledger programmability a.k.a. smart contracts. In addition to the EVM sidechain, which is already in the works, native capabilities on XRPL Mainnet are explored.

The XRP Ledger is built to be extremely efficient at moving value, with robust infrastructure (incl. native capabilities – DEX + AMM, Escrow, NFTs, Authorized Trustlines, IOUs, etc), stability and security. Developers get access to these composable, powerful primitives simply by…

— RippleX (@RippleXDev) September 3, 2024

David comments how ”very excited” he is about the announcement:

”Read this thread and blog post to understand what new native and sidechain programmability could bring to the XRP Ledger – and why I’m very excited about the possibilities.”

Comments Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse: “With new programmability in the works for the XRP Ledger (something the XRP community has rightly been asking for) and the growing opportunity for Ripple’s enterprise products to serve crypto-native customers (such as Futureverse using Ripple Custody) – the foundations of crypto infrastructure serving real-world use cases are steadily becoming more robust by the day.

With new programmability in the works for the XRP Ledger (something the XRP community has rightly been asking for) and the growing opportunity for Ripple’s enterprise products to serve crypto-native customers (such as @futureverse using Ripple Custody) – the foundations of crypto… https://t.co/ZLQXl0BcOD

— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) September 3, 2024