Coil, a key entity in the XRP ecosystem and a company backed by millions of dollars from Ripple has surprisingly announced that it will cease operations. The company, led by CEO Stefan Thomas, used to provide one of three Unique Node Lists (UNLs) for the XRPL, alongside Ripple and the XRP Ledger Foundation.

It is therefore no exaggeration to say that Coil has been one of the most important entities in the XRP ecosystem and has contributed significantly to its growth.

Moreover, in August 2019, the company received one billion XRP from Ripple’s investment arm Xpring, the equivalent of about $260 million at the time, to create and promote use cases involving the monetization of digital content on the XRP Ledger.

Ripple-Backed Coil Ceases Operations

In a series of tweets, Thomas stated that “this is goodbye but not farewell” for him and referred to a post on the website of Coil. There, it says that Coil is now handing over responsibilities related to the growth of the Interleger Protocol (ILP) to a neutral body in the form of the Interledger Foundation:

When we started Coil in 2018, Interledger was only an idea. Over the last five years we breathed life into the technology and sparked a vibrant ecosystem around it. Now it’s time to pass the torch to a neutral body […].

As part of this decision, Coil has decided to discontinue all Coil products and development efforts on March 15, 2023. According to the company, Coil was always intended to be an accelerator for the initial phase of the Interlegder Protocol:

Coil’s approach of providing memberships was always meant as a stepping stone to establish Web Monetization as the first open standard for creators and developers to get paid on the Web.

In the near future there will be full-featured Interledger wallets powering Web Monetization and many other use cases.

The CEO of Coil further stated on Twitter that “the work continues.” Thomas personally will remain the chairman of the board of the Interledger Foundation and will continue to focus on the project. “Part of it will be building Dassie, and I’m looking forward to having more hours for programming,” Thomas said, saying further:

I’ve been working on XRP-related projects for more than ten years now, which is a long time. Great things require perseverance, and I’m proud to be part of a community that values real solutions and consistent progress over ideology and hype. Slow and steady wins the race.

The project Dassie mentioned by Thomas is an open-source effort that combines the ILP and peer-to-peer technology to make it easier for developers to experiment with and build on the Interledger. As stated in a Coil post, the ILP has been used very effectively in recent years by “a small group of early adopters.”

To overcome this challenge, Thomas is working on Dassie, which will allow developers to create nodes and send micropayments using the ILP.

At press time, the XRP price stood at $0.4120 and was once again rejected at the 200-day EMA yesterday.