By Sologenic recently released its DEX (decentralized exchange), which is a front end to the XRPL’s native DEX. Sologenic is affiliated with Coinfield, one of the few exchanges that allow Canadians to deposit and withdraw funds using Interac e-Transfers. Most Canadian banks will not allow customers to send money to exchanges using debit or credit cards. E-Transfer support is one of the few convenient ways Canadians have to deposit funds onto an exchange, so when a message popped up in the Coinfield app on my phone advertising Sologenic DEX, I was excited to try it out.
You can access the DEX in a web browser and connect either the native SOLO wallet (currently unavailable on iOS) or other third-party wallets like XUMM, Ledger, and the D’CENT wallet. When you sign in with XUMM, the wallet asks you to sign a “sign-in” transaction. When you subsequently try and swap assets, it again asks you to sign the transaction in XUMM before it will allow you to send anything. The sign-in transaction doesn’t gives the SOLO Dex (or a convincing phishing site) the ability to sign transactions for the user, which is good. That’s how it should be working.
Using XRP or Sologenic’s native asset SOLO, users can trade any asset they’ve created a trustline for with the XRPL DEX. In their current form, the issued assets are a novelty. If you’re going to hold a BTC IOU on the XRPL, you might as well use an exchange or self-custody to hold actual BTC or ETH, particularly because you would then have the option to send the currency to an actual BTC address or to participate in smart contracts and other dapps with ETH. However, if we consider tokenized assets in light of Ripple’s push to enable a bridge between private central-bank backed digital currencies (CBDCs) and public ledgers like the XRPL, the DEX starts to get interesting.
If a nation-state were to enable interoperability between its private ledger and the XRPL, it would allow anyone holding the CBDC (a tokenized euro, USD, CAD, etc.) to purchase and hold XRP without using a centralized intermediary like an exchange. From there, they could plug into a multitude of different utility tokens like Casino Coin or use their funds to purchase XRP or participate in DeFi apps on the Flare Network, with every transaction after the initial one occurring without a centralized entity.
It may even be possible for smart contracts to issue tokenized representations of other assets backed by actual collateralized cryptocurrency, fiat currency, and other forms of collateral stored in a smart contract, which would provide holders of the IOUs decentralized assurance of the value of the tokens they’re holding on the XRPL. Smart contracts could even send non-native assets to external wallets trustlessly if users wanted to. Beyond crypto, the XRPL DEX and the potential future interoperability with CBDCs would also allow people to use national currency and stablecoins with bridges onto the ledger to buy stocks tokenized on the XRPL.
I wasn’t able to play around with the native Sologenic DEX wallet as it doesn’t have an iOS client yet but the tokenized stocks and other assets that it will eventually offer will enable people to easily buy stocks, bonds, and commodities on the XRPL DEX. Ripple has been beating the interoperability drum for years, and a DEX integrated with bridges to private CBDC ledgers is a big step towards this goal, assuming central banks and nation-states are willing to sign up.
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