We all are particular with our coins. We have those who claim Bitcoin is King. Others believe Ethereum (ETH) is the future of Smart Contracts. There is also a vast majority of XRP holders who believe that xRapid will catapult the digital assets to market levels only seen earlier on in the year.
Interledger aims at connecting all these blockchains thus allowing their users to seamlessly send funds between them without having to convert their cryptocurrencies.
The Interledger project has one goal in mind, to allow its users to receive money from any ledger without setting up accounts on lots of different services or wallets. This then means that users will not necessarily have to create different addresses on the the different blockchains, to send or receive funds
How Interledger Will Accomplish This
Interledger was born from the need to create a blockhain-agnostic smart contract platform. Simply put, being blockchain-agnostic means that the smart contracts on Interledger would be universal: they would operate on any blockchain through what are known as Connectors.
The team at Interledger define Connectors as follows:
A Connector is a system that provides the service of forwarding Interledger packets towards the destination provided in the packet. Packets are forwarded across connections (called accounts) between senders, connectors and receivers.
Interledger packets describe amounts of money, which may be settled individually or in aggregate through various kinds of external payment systems collectively referred to as ledgers.
This definition is a bit complex. This is why the Co-Inventor of Interledger, Evan Schwartz, would like the reader to compare connectors to decentralized exchanges. He goes on to explain how they function as follows:
Connectors are independent operators that act as decentralized exchanges or market makers for cryptocurrencies, fiat currencies, and other tokenized assets.
With this simpler definition, we can now understand how an owner of Bitcoin, will be able to send a certain amount of BTC to a recipient on the XRP ledger. The connectors will simply do the conversions in the flow of the transaction without either end having to worry too much about what happens.
Building on Interledger
Developers are being encouraged to build on the Interledger protocol. One has the option of running a Connector as well as building Decentralized applications on the platfomr. More on this can be found on the Ripple’s XPring website as well as the Interledger blog on Medium.com.