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Chris Larsen (Co-founder and CEO) and Greg Kidd (Chief Risk Officer)—imagery courtesy of Money2020

In less than two weeks, Ripple Labs will be joining thousands of industry and thought leaders at Money20/20 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Of the 7,000+ attendees, there will be “670 CEOs, from over 2,300 companies and 60 countries.” The team is looking forward to build on the success of Sibos earlier this month, where the Ripple narrative really picked up momentum toward industry acceptance.

Speaking schedule:

  • Greg Kidd (Chief Risk Officer): “Cryptocurrencies & Consumer Protection Issues”—Sunday, Nov. 2 at 1:00-1:45pm
  • Chris Larsen (Co-founder and CEO): “Remittances: Retail, Electronic & Cryptocurrencies”—Sunday, Nov. 2 at 3:00-3:45pm

If you’re interested in learning how Ripple is driving down cross-border transaction costs for banks like Fidor, please contact us at to schedule a meeting with a Ripple Labs representative.

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Last Friday we did a master release of ripple-rest version 1.3.0. We’ve done a few changes externally but the substantial additions in 1.3.0 have been stability and verbose error handling. If you’ve been following the commits on [github](https://github.com/ripple/ripple-rest), we’ve also vastly improved test coverage and introduced simplicity by removing the need for Postgres.

 

Below is a list of some of the major changes and an explanation of the decisions we made for this last release.

 

  • Improved error handling: Error handling logic has been rewritten to provide clearer feedback for all requests. Prior to 1.3.0, an error could respond with a 200-299 range HTTP status code stating that the ripple-rest server was able to respond but the request may not have been successful. This put the burden on the developers to parse through the response body to determine whether something was successful or not. In version 1.3.0, ripple-rest will only return a “success” (200-299 range) when the actual request is successful and developers can expect that the response body will match what a successful request looks like. With actual errors and errors responses, ripple-rest will now include an error_type (a short code identifying the error), an error (a human-readable summary), and an optional message (for longer explanation of errors if needed). Details [here](http://dev.ripple.com/ripple-rest.html#errors).

 

  • DB support for SQLite on disk, and removal of Postgres support: Version 1.3.0 now directly supports both SQLite in memory and on disk. We’ve removed support for Postgres based on feedback that the installation has been a huge burden for the minimal amount of data that is stored in ripple-rest. The installation with SQLite is now much leaner and configuring a new database is as simple as pointing to a flat file location in the config.json. In the future, we may revisit adding additional database connectors for clustered and high availability deployments, but we’re much more keen on the usability and simplicity of only supporting SQLite at this point.

 

  • Config.json 2.0: The previous config.json 1.0.1 was confusing and disabling things like SSL required removal of lines inside the config file while environment variables could be set to overwrite config file values. We’ve cleaned up a lot of that messiness and we’ve modified the new config.json so that all configurations are fully transparent. SSL can be disabled simply by setting “ssl_enabled” as false and in order to switch to SQLite in memory the “db_path” should be set to “:memory:” instead of pointing to a flat file. Lastly, as a reminder to folks who didn’t know, ripple-rest does support a multi-server configuration in the array of “rippled_servers”. Documentation on config file can be found [here](https://github.com/ripple/ripple-rest/blob/develop/docs/server-configuration.md)

 

  • /v1/wallet/new endpoint: Easy and simple way to generate ripple wallets! No explanation needed!
  • Removed /v1/tx/{:hash} and /v1/transaction/{:hash}: Use `/v1/transactions/{:hash}`. This change serves to provide consistency with REST standards.

 

  • Removed /v1/payments: Use `/v1/accounts/{source_address}/payments` to submit a payment. This change serves to provide consistency in the payment flow.

 

We appreciate the continued feedback from those of you who are building integrations with ripple-rest and appreciate all the support that you’ve given us so far.

 

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Nearly 300 Ripple enthusiasts attended Around the World in 5 Seconds.

Despite pouring rain, nearly three hundred guests attended Around the World in 5 Seconds, a special night of demos and celebration at the Ripple Labs office in downtown San Francisco, an event meant to engage the local community and share our vision of Ripple’s potential.

Attendees ranged from engineers, product managers, and senior executives from blue-chip tech, banking and consulting companies to entrepreneurs bootstrapping their own ventures.

 

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Signing in.

A series of product demos provided developers, investors, and industry leaders a tangible, hands-on experience for understanding how the Ripple protocol facilitates faster, cheaper, and more frictionless global payments than ever before.

 

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Learning about the intricacies of real-time settlement and the internet-of-value.

One demo station was manned by Marco Montes, who you might recognize from the newly re-designed Ripple.com homepage. Marco is the founder and CEO of Saldo.mx, a novel remittance service that allows US customers to pay bills back in Mexico using the Ripple protocol.

 

 

Ripple Labs CTO Stefan Thomas and software engineer Evan Schwartz delivered two back-to-back tech talks on Codius, an ecosystem for developing distributed applications that utilizes smart contracts, to two jam-packed and enthusiastic crowds.

 

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Stefan and Evan explain Codius.

The presentation represents the first of a series of talks as part of our mission to better educate the broader community about Ripple technology, behind the scenes developments, as well as our take on the industry at large.

A warm thank you to all those who weathered the storm and helped make this inaugural event a resounding success. It surely won’t be the last so we look forward to seeing you at the next one, along with those who weren’t able to make it out this time.

 

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It was a packed house. See you next time!

Check out the Ripple Labs Facebook page for more photos of the event—courtesy of Ripple Labs senior software engineer and “head of photography,” Vahe Hovhannisyan. (You should also check out his Instagram.)

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The Ripple Gateway SnapSwap.EU will be changing the playing ground for all of these cards however with the launch of the new SmartyCard. The new card is for non-US citizens, a Visa prepaid card on the Ripple network. Anyone with a SnapSwap account simply has to fund the card from that account with any asset available in the Ripple Wallet

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“Ripple changes the dynamics of value, allowing for a real-time market that can instantly trade between gold, currency, mobile minutes, and more,” GBI’s co-founder and CEO Steven Feldman said. “Our integration into Ripple allows us to continue our push into digital currencies by enabling investors to now buy digital physical gold…”

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Codius

Today, we released the first prototype and source code for Codius, the smart contracts implementation centered around the concept of smart oracles (check out the white paper if you missed it). Codius is open source and everything is available on Github.

Right now the prototype and contracts are written in Javascript but very soon you’ll be able to code smart contracts in any programming language.

This initial release includes a basic version of a host, a test sandbox, and a few examples of what you can do inside the sandbox—which, as we’re continuing to discover, is quite a lot.

We’ve got a first example Bitcoin contract that uses BitcoinJS to sign transactions using the contract’s unique public/private keypair. This lays the groundwork for implementing all kinds of complex logic on top of Bitcoin, Ripple, and other cryptocurrency wallets.

We’re also porting Express.js into the sandbox so that you can have a contract that even acts as a web server. This means that you’ll be able to serve up entire web pages using Codius, which opens the door for building full-fledged services with smart contracts.

And that’s also where you come in. We’re actively looking for developers to help contribute to the open source project. To get involved in the community check out the forum and the chat room on Gitter.

Full release details:

  • codius engine—the system responsible for executing contract code
  • codius-host—the smart oracle software that allows users to upload code, get unique tokens for their contract, and in the near future will handle billing
  • codius-cli—the command line interface for interacting with the engine
  • node-sandbox—the pure javascript sandbox we’re using while we work on getting Google’s Native Client integrated
  • example-helloworld—a simple hello world contract
  • example-require—a sample contract demonstrating how require works inside the sandbox
  • example-bitcoin—a sample bitcoin contract that demonstrates how bitcoinjs can be used inside the sandbox
  • example-webserver—a sample contract demonstrating running a simple webserver inside a contract

See also:

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