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