Over the next quarter we will set out our plans to trustlessly integrate XRP with Flare. This will enable smart contracts with XRP, on a next generation blockchain, with settlement on the XRP Ledger.

Today we are very excited to announce an important stepping stone in getting to that reality, the launch of the Flare public test network, codenamed “Coston”.

The Coston testnet is designed with two goals in mind:

1) As a testbed for developers that want to utilize Flare with XRP to develop and test applications before risking actual value and;

2) To test various functionality and smart contracts that will form the core utility of the Flare Network.

The Flare Network will have a two way trustless integration with XRP. On Coston, this is modelled as a basic one way peg, whereby a user burns test XRP tokens to receive representative XRP tokens. This gives developers and Flare a methodology for building and optimizing applications that account for the interaction between the Flare Network and the XRP Ledger.

Coston is structured as a network running the official release of the Avalanche consensus protocol while leveraging the Ethereum Virtual Machine for smart contracts.

Flare and Coston implement and customize Avalanche to form a Turing-complete Federated Byzantine Agreement System as per https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.09839.pdf. This deployment of Avalanche achieves the desired specifications of the Flare Consensus Protocol https://flare.xyz/app/uploads/2019/11/FCP.pdf whilst leveraging the robustness of the wider open-source development of Avalanche to which Flare will also be contributing.

To read the Docs and start using Coston: https://github.com/flare-eng/coston

Why is it called Coston?

Flare's testnet is named in remembrance and celebration of a great inventor, Martha J. Coston (1826-1904). Born in Baltimore in 1826, Martha Coston was widowed at the age of 21. Finding plans in her late husband’s notebook for a night time signal flare, which didn’t work, with considerable effort she spent the next 10 years redesigning and perfecting the technology. Martha Coston’s invention gave the Union a decided advantage in the American Civil War and the company she founded, the Coston Supply company, was in business until the 1970’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Coston