Ripple’s Next Stage – The Launch Of Cobalt! But What’s Taking So Long, And How Will Things Change?

One thing that has been easy to rely on Ripple (XRP) enthusiasts for is their excitement over what is next. Ripple has been incredibly vocal about all of the projects that they have in store, but there is still been many surprises, which HODrs have tried to guess. Is Western Union prepared to integrate XRP to perform fast payments over borders? Will MoneyGram get involved to? Does Santander have the legwork ready to launch an XRP Based exchange?

Unfortunately, Ripple has been silent lately. In fact, they have barely posted at all, which is probably due to the pending update that they have been working on. This update changes the algorithm, and they already submitted a whitepaper on the topic, which is titled “Cobalt: BFT Governance in Open Networks.” The paper was published by the Cornell University computer science repository, and by Ethan MacBrough, who works for Ripple.

When this new algorithm, users will see a striking improvement to the speed and dependability of the platform, allowing transactions to go through in one second, as opposed to the current 4-second time. Even though the speed is probably what most users want to see, the fact is that the Cobalt update will help the Ripple network to be more consistent and reliable, which is much more stringent than consumers can find with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. It also will help the XRP tokens to flow better throughout their transactions, with little risk of backing up.

Ripple introduced Cobalt with the following post: “We present Cobalt, a novel atomic broadcast algorithm that works in networks with non-uniform trust and no global agreement on participants and is probabilistically guaranteed to make forward progress even in the presence of maximal faults and arbitrary asynchrony. The exact properties that Cobalt satisfies makes it particularly applicable to designing an efficient decentralized “voting network” that allows a public, open-entry group of nodes to agree on changes to some shared set of rules in a fair and consistent manner while tolerating some trusted nodes and arbitrarily many untrusted nodes behaving maliciously. We also define a new set of properties which must be satisfied by any safe decentralized governance algorithm, and all of which Cobalt satisfies.”

The only way for XRP to truly make positive changes in the cross-border payment systems of the banking industry is to improve their platform. That is why the Cobalt update is necessary, because it will provide more trust and opportunity to banks that has not been available before now. Furthermore, the addition of Cobalt ensures that consumers will not have their transaction stopped, like when a credit card is declined at a grocery store or a restaurant. At the most, the system will slow down, but the transaction will still go through.

Many users are still wondering when this algorithm will be made available, but it will not be much longer. In fact, once Cobalt is launched, there will be nothing to prevent XRP from being used in nearly every part of the financial industry, assuming that banks follow suit. There is not a certain date for the technology upgrade to go live, whether the launch is days or months away, but it is obvious that users will be happy when it is.

The whitepaper for Cobalt, in its entirety, can be viewed at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07240.pdf.