Hooks, Sidechains, and Smart-Contract-Style Programmability

Why the XRP Ledger mainnet has no general-purpose smart contracts, and how Hooks, Xahau, and sidechains fill that gap.

No general-purpose smart contracts on mainnet

Unlike Ethereum and many newer chains, the core XRP Ledger mainnet does not support arbitrary, general-purpose smart contracts. Its native feature set (trust lines, the DEX, the AMM, escrow, payment channels, NFTs) covers a lot of payments-oriented functionality directly at the protocol level, but it is not a general computation platform. This was a deliberate design tradeoff, prioritizing the predictability, security, and performance of a narrower, purpose-built feature set over the flexibility (and attack surface) of an open-ended virtual machine.

Hooks

Hooks are small, lightweight pieces of logic (compiled to WebAssembly) that can be attached to an XRPL-style account, running automatically before or after a transaction affecting that account — for example, to reject a transaction that doesn't meet custom criteria, or to trigger a follow-up action. Hooks are intentionally much more constrained than a full smart-contract environment like the Ethereum Virtual Machine: they are meant to be small, auditable, and cheap to run, rather than supporting arbitrarily complex application logic.

Hooks are not enabled on XRPL mainnet. Instead, they were developed and deployed on a dedicated sidechain.

Xahau: the Hooks-enabled sidechain

Xahau is an independent sidechain, built from the same rippled-derived codebase, that activates Hooks and adds its own native token (XAH) and additional features not present on XRPL mainnet. It is bridged to the XRP Ledger so that value can move between the two networks, letting developers experiment with programmable logic without changing the risk profile of XRPL mainnet itself.

The EVM-compatible sidechain

Separately, an EVM-compatible XRPL sidechain has been developed to let Solidity-based Ethereum smart contracts and tooling be deployed in an environment bridged to the XRP Ledger — aimed at developers who want full smart-contract flexibility while still settling value back to XRP and the broader XRPL ecosystem, rather than needing XRPL mainnet itself to add EVM support directly.

Why sidechains rather than changing mainnet

This "innovate on a sidechain, keep mainnet conservative" pattern lets the ecosystem experiment with more powerful (and higher-risk) programmability without requiring the XRPL's amendment process (see What Is the XRP Ledger?) to approve fundamentally more complex, harder-to-audit functionality for the base settlement layer that the rest of the ecosystem depends on.

Conceptually adjacent to all of this is the Interledger Protocol (ILP), an open protocol — originally incubated at Ripple, now developed as an independent, W3C-associated standard — for routing payments across different ledgers and payment networks (not just within the XRPL), using a similar trust-and-routing philosophy to the XRPL's own trust lines. ILP is not specific to XRP and does not require using it, but it shares intellectual lineage with the ledger's original design goals around interoperable value transfer.