Ripple Smart Contracts Creator Targets Ethereum with New Tech Launch

Ripple's former CTO Stefan Thomas is going up against Ethereum with the launch of a new smart contracts platform.

Well, "New" isn't quite right - the platform Thomas released implementations for today is Codius, an open-source project that Ripple released in beta in 2014 but shelved the following year.

Now having announced his departure from Ripple in May, Thomas is re-launching Codius as the technical backbone for his new company, Coil.

The implementation released today comes with tutorials for uploading and hosting Codius smart contracts, to try and push developers to start using the platform right away.

In contrast to Ethereum, Codius was designed to allow developers to write smart contract code in any programming language and have the smart contracts work as "Smart oracles," communicating with outside data sources.

Adding smart contracts opened up new ways to attack the ledger, and the technical architecture was cumbersome.

Speaking in 2015, Thomas said that building smart contracts into a blockchain was like writing software directly into a database - difficult.

Codius would serve as that middle layer, Thomas said, adding, "You would have a bit of code that's accessing some assets on XRP ledger, that's accessing some data that's in Ethereum, and maybe it's making an HTTP call and so you have a much more flexible architecture. And most importantly you can have those kinds of contracts call other contracts as well."

As it relates to security, Thomas argues, Codius has several advantages over Ethereum and other smart contract blockchains.

While the code is still "Rough," Thomas remains optimistic that Codius will prove a step forward for developers writing smart contracts that solve problems for today's businesses.