On September 3, Ripple announced key announcements released in South Korea and Japan this week. Ripple and the XRP community are committed to bringing new programmability, including smart contracts, to the XRPL development ecosystem through the XRPL EVM sidechain (already in progress) in 2025, and exploring native functions on the XRPL mainnet. In addition, the metaverse startup Futureverse has partnered with Ripple Custody to securely custody its assets. Futureverse has adopted the XRPL NFT standard, uses XRP as the Gas token on its Root network, and integrates with the XRPL DEX to provide network liquidity.