Axelar Gives Ripple’s EVM Sidechain Instant Superpowers

Cross-chain maximalists, rejoice: Ripple’s brand-new XRP (XRP) Ledger EVM sidechain didn’t even have time to collect its first gas fee before Axelar (AXL) welded it to 80-plus other networks. 

Day-one connectivity means wrapped XRP can now pop over to Polygon for a yield binge, dart back to Cosmos for IBC swaps, or settle on Avalanche (AVAX) for shites and giggle-nfts (no custom bridges, no Discord-link scams, no 16-step guides). 

Squid handles the click-and-go interface; Axelar’s General Message Passing moves the bits; your transaction finally stops feeling like a hostage exchange.

Why the rush? Ripple wants DeFi credibility without gutting its compliance swagger. The sidechain keeps XRP as the native gas token, retains XRPL’s decade-tested validator set, and still posts sub-second blocks.

Yet, it now speaks Solidity, so any DEX, money market, or derivatives protocol can redeploy with one line in the hardhat config. Institutional desks that already park stablecoins on XRPL can plug into EVM liquidity, while cowboys on Ethereum get a frictionless hop to a ledger banks actually read.

Axelar brings the secret sauce: canonical wrapped assets and message verification baked at the protocol layer, not tacked on as an afterthought. That quells the usual nightmare of double-mint exploits and liquidity fragmentation. 

Early partners already lining up: Strobe for lending, Securd for collateralised leverage, Vertex for perpetuals, Blockscout for chain spelunking, and Goldsky for indexed data. Builders can call contracts on XRPL Mainnet from the sidechain without spawning yet another wallet-“multichain” finally behaves like a single product, not a marketing term.

The bigger play is RWAs. Regulators like XRP’s audit trail; funds want tokenised dollars that actually move; Axelar’s pipes mean those dollars can now slosh anywhere capital efficiency demands. 

CTO David Schwartz calls it “EVM without breaking the Ledger.” Axelar’s Georgios Vlachos calls it the launchpad for institutional stablecoins. Either way, the move shoves XRPL from niche remittance rail to full-stack liquidity venue overnight. 

If you’re still waiting for an invitation to multichain DeFi, check your spam folder - Axelar just sent it.

Also See: UMA Trains GPT To Admit Doubt

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