Did anyone actually see this coming?
I’ll be honest, most of us in our Friday Telegram hangout were convinced Ripple would keep XRPL "pure" and EVM-free for at least another cycle. We were wrong. Late Thursday, two Ripple engineers—Mayukha Vadari and Nicolas Caballero—confirmed on an internal dev call (yes, the recording leaked within 30 minutes; the internet moves fast) that the EVM-compatible sidechain is slated for mainnet in Q2 2025. That’s April-to-June next year. Suddenly, a ledger that’s spent a decade shouting “we’re not Ethereum” is busy rolling out the welcome mat for Solidity devs.
Quick rewind: what exactly is being shipped?
Ripple’s team is building a sidechain, not a hard fork or layer-one refactor. Think of it as XRPL prime on one side, an EVM playground on the other, connected by a bidirectional bridge. Assets can be wrapped back and forth at a projected fee of 0.25 XRP per hop (roughly $0.13 at Friday’s $0.52 price). Block time is targeting 3.5 seconds, which sits between classic XRPL (≈4 s) and Polygon PoS (≈2 s). The sidechain validator set will start permissioned—twenty-one nodes, half run by Ripple, half by community partners like Bithomp, GateHub, and the much-memed PattyXRP validator.
Why the mixed vibe on CryptoTwitter?
The crypto crowd is rarely unanimous. Here’s a slice of what people are actually saying:
“If Ripple wanted Solidity, they could’ve just funded an ETH killer in 2018. Now they’re late to the party.” –@bagholderbill
“Everyone complaining forgets we begged for DeFi on XRPL for years. This is literally how we get it.” –@xpectrum_isaac
We ran a quick poll in the r/Ripple subreddit. Out of 1,140 votes, 58 % said the sidechain is ‘bullish and overdue,’ 29 % are ‘meh, wait and see,’ and 13 % believe it ‘dilutes XRPL’s USP.’ Can’t blame the skeptics—every chain that promised EVM compatibility (looking at you, Cardano sidechains) has struggled with liquidity bootstrapping.
From rumor to roadmap: the timeline looks real
Ripple’s slides outline three milestones:
- DevNet refresh – January 2024 (already live, 400+ wallets active)
- Public Testnet v2 – September 2024 (opens to Solidity devs, faucets supplied with 10 M test XRP)
- Mainnet launch – Q2 2025 (bridge capped at 1 B XRP TVL for its first six months)
The burning question is liquidity. Without USDC/USDT pools, DeFi is a ghost town. Ripple has apparently earmarked $35 M in incentives—half in XRP, half in USD—to lure AMMs, options protocols, and NFT platforms to deploy on day one. We’ve seen similar stunts work for Base and Linea. Whether it sticks on XRPL will depend on, well, the SEC, which still refuses to give XRP the all-clear despite the partial court win last summer.
Possible alpha for the builders among us
On the call, Caballero hinted at “non-custodial cross-margining between XRPL native DEX and the EVM sidechain.” In plain English: you’ll be able to post on-chain XRP as collateral for perp contracts settled in an EVM environment without touching a centralized exchange. That’s spicy. If you’re coding up a perpetuals engine, pay attention to XRPL’s built-in order-book logic; you might front-run the big boys.
Tangent time: does this blur the line between L1s and L2s?
I’m not entirely sure about this, but it feels like chains are giving up on winning the “base layer” war and are instead cozying up to EVM for user acquisition. Avalanche, Solana, now Ripple. When everyone starts speaking Solidity, does it really matter which chain you’re on? Or do we end up back in 2017 where the logo on MetaMask is the only difference?
Meanwhile, Ethereum is busy shipping blobs (EIP-4844) to make rollups cheaper. If blockspace becomes abundant, sidechains could look redundant. But that’s a debate for another beer-powered Spaces session.
Why this matters for your portfolio
If you’re holding XRP, the obvious question is price action. Historically, XRP pumps hardest on lawsuit milestones, not tech upgrades. Still, liquidity begets attention. For context, Polygon’s MATIC rallied 240 % in the six months after launching its EVM bridge in 2021. No guarantee XRPL repeats the move, but if TVL spikes above $500 M, traders won’t ignore it.
On the flip side, there’s smart-contract risk. Recall the Nomad bridge hack ($190 M) last year. Wrapped assets are only as safe as their weakest validator. Ripple says a Time-Based Key Rotation system will mitigate rogue signers, but we haven’t seen an external audit yet. Proceed with caution, keep bridging amounts sane, and, yes, write down your seed phrase on something sturdier than a Post-it.
So, bullish or baloney? Here’s my gut take
I’ve spent a decade hating on “EVM everything,” yet even I admit this patch could unlock serious composability. We can finally deploy Uniswap-style AMMs that trade native XRP without ugly wrapped IOUs. That alone is worth a trial run. If Ripple nails the bridging UX (one-click swaps inside Xumm would be chef’s kiss), we might witness the first genuinely sticky DeFi wave on XRPL.
Still, Q2 2025 is a lifetime in crypto. By then, we could be in a post-halving melt-up or a full-blown bear desert. Ripple has to ship and ship securely. For now, I’m parking a modest bag in cold storage, farming airdrops on the DevNet, and keeping alerts on xrpscan.com for any whale-sized bridge transactions. Let’s see if the hype survives the next twelve months.
Data-driven crystal ball
Assuming the sidechain captures even 2 % of Ethereum’s current $55 B TVL, that’s $1.1 B flowing onto XRPL rails. If we pair that with historical XRP velocity (average 18 day turnover), on-chain fee revenue could jump 5-6 x relative to 2023. My conservative model pegs XRP at $1.10-$1.30 by late 2025—contingent on no fresh SEC curveballs. Place your bets, but hedge them too.
