Former CTO of Ripple, Stefan Thomas granted an interview where he explained the key reasons why the Ripple ledger doesn’t support smart contracts.
The interview was aired on an episode of BlockStars which is hosted by the Ripples CTO, David Schwartz, had the previous CTO and now CEO of coli on hand to discuss issues surrounding smart contracts.
In their defense, the former CTO said they had already developed a working prototype that was going to work, but they found out that security and usability issues would continuously be a problem.
The main problem that the smart contracts gave the team of developers, according to Thomas, was the non-deterministic results that the codes had.
Ripple ex-CTO says XRP Ledger had challenges supporting smart contracts
According to Thomas’ words, the XRP ledger’s core factor was its deterministic ability, which was a means to make payment much easier.
He confirmed that another major problem faced by the developers was how to write the code for the programming language.
We wanted our developers to write the codes in a language that everyone would understand
Thomas is presently working on a smart contracts platform
He said that when that became a nagging issue, the company said they wouldn’t want to create a more sophisticated way to make transactions, one which adding the smart contracts into the XRP Ledger would cause.
Thomas confirmed that he has been working on a project named Codius since 2013, if fully developed, the platform can support smart contracts.
According to Thomas, he was making websites before he decided to venture into the world of freelancing, but all the platforms were overcharging, and he didn’t like it. After several unsuccessful trials, Thomas was able to develop a Bitcoin blockchain-powered BitcoinJS.
Thomas further said he was previously working at Kraken directly under Jesse Powell, the CEO before he met then CEO of Ripple, Chris Larsen. Thomas was recruited to work with the Open Coin team, which is now known as Ripple Labs.
