Ex-Ripple CTO’s Firm For Content Micro-Tipping Coil Winding Down: What It Means For XRP Ecosystem

Coil, a content monetization platform founded by Ripple’s former chief technology officer Stefan Thomas, is sunsetting. According to Thomas, the blockchain project which supported XRP micropayments in real-time is only bidding farewell but not goodbye.

Coil Bids Farewell

In an open letter to the community, which Stefan Thomas shared on Twitter on Feb. 2, he explained why the project is sunsetting.

While at Ripple, Thomas co-created Interledger, an interoperability protocol that facilitates payments across different networks. This technology, which is open source, was being used as the basis of Coil.

He notes that when Coil launched in 2018, Interledger was merely an idea. Over the last five years, however, much work has been put into the technology, and a rich ecosystem has grown around it. But “now it’s time to pass the torch to a neutral body in the form of the Interledger Foundation to steward the future development of Interledger,” Thomas said.

Coil has decided to sunset its products and development efforts as part of this evolution. Coil no longer accepts new customer memberships as of Feb 2, 2023, and the San Francisco-based blogging startup will halt its service on March 15, 2023.

Thomas revealed there would be “full-featured Interledger wallets powering web monetization and many other use cases” in the near future.

Thomas To Remain Involved In Interledger Development

The ex-Ripple CTO further noted that his work on the Interledger protocol would continue as he will stay involved as the Chairperson of the Board at the Interledger Foundation.

Coil supported monetization for content creators across literary writing, journalism, music, photography, and podcasts, charging content consumers a $5 monthly subscription fee to access the platform.

As ZyCrypto reported in August 2019, Ripple’s investment arm, Xpring, participated in Coil’s $4 million seed round and provided a 1 billion XRP grant to the platform — worth over $260 million.

When asked by a Twitter user what happened to the quarter of a billion XRP gift from Ripple’s Xpring initiative, Thomas said, “most of it was in the form of a fund that we could draw from. This money never left Ripple. Now that Coil is winding down, I assume they’ll reallocate those funds toward other projects. The biggest drawdown against the fund was the $100m to @Interledger/GftW.”