Coil Relaunches Ripple Codius
Stefan Thomas, the former Chief Technology Officer of Ripple, has launched his own company called Coil and is going head to head with Ethereum with the introduction of the smart contract platform, Codius.
This platform is an open-source project that had been launched in its beta version by Ripple in 2014. However, the project was put away the very next year because of a lack of a proper standard for payments in the smart contracts ecosystem. The other reason why the project was shelved was because of the market for it being too small.
However, now, Thomas is hoping to change that situation by making the smart contract platform Codius the backbone of his new company, Coil.
What Does Codius Do?
Current smart contract platforms are not very practical because they require developers to learn new and difficult programming languages. And Ethereum, which is one of the few platforms that allows for the building of smart contracts, is facing serious scalability issues, meaning users have to pay much more to build their smart contracts on its platform. With Codius, programmers can use simple languages such as C++ or Java to build their smart contracts. This makes it significantly cheaper and easier to use than Ethereum.
Another issue that Codius will address is being able to monetize web content. This has so far been done by clumsy “workarounds” such as paywalls, ads or even data harvesting (you can see how that turned out for Facebook). However, now, using Interledger technology developed by Ripple which allows for payments to be sent across ledgers, users can make micropayments to websites that they visit.
This means that Codius could enable “revenue disbursement contracts”, meaning the smart contract could be used to collect money from people who watch a movie online, and then that money could be disbursed to all the people who were involved in making that movie. Basically, people would get a steady stream of income for their work done rather than a lump-sum payment.
Codius Reception So Far
The development of Codius sounds like an ambitious plan, however, if there is someone who can pull it off, it is Thomas. He was one of the primary creators of Interledger at Ripple and he also published one of the first white papers about smart contracts way back in 2014.
People so far have received the idea of Codius well. The platform has already attracted two early adopters – Telindus, a major IT company in Luxembourg, and Wietse Wind, an open source software tools developer from the Netherlands. Josh Williams, who invested in gaming platforms such as Zynga, Unity and Kabam, said he too would be using Codius for some of his new gaming ventures.