XRPL is building what it refused. Xahau built it first

In 2023 a group of developers forked the XRP Ledger because its validators would not adopt smart contracts. Three years later the parent chain is shipping its own programmability layer, and the drafted specification names the fork’s technology as an inspiration. Here is what actually happened, what it means for XAH, and why three competing architectures now answer the same question. Summary Xahau launched in 2023 as a fork of the XRP Ledger’s rippled codebase, carrying the Hooks amendment that XRPL validators never adopted, with its own token, its own validator set, and a governance system run through a genesis account hook. The XRP Ledger is now building programmability natively: XLS-100d Smart Escrows, using WebAssembly, sits among known amendments with a devnet live, and XLS-101 Smart Contracts is a drafted specification that cites both Hooks and the Ethereum Virtual Machine as influences. Xahau rejects the sidechain framing entirely, positioning itself as an independent Layer 1 that diverged in its own direction, with features the parent lacks and vice versa, and describing the borrowing as mutual. Three architectures now answer the same question for one ecosystem: Hooks on Xah...