Xpring, Ripple’s investment and incubator arm, announced on Wednesday (October 16) that it had invested in Swedish startup Towo Labs, which is developing open-source firmware that will allow popular hardware wallets to provide full support for the XRP Ledger (XRPL), which means that XRP HODLers will be able to use all 17 XRPL transaction types in a secure non-custodial fashion.

 Xpring’s announcement says that Towo Labs is the team that created the extremely useful resource XRP Toolkit, which provides a “trustless, non-custodial web interface to the XRP Ledger.”

Towo Labs’ advisors include Matvey Mukha, Founder of Secalot, and Wietse Wind, Founder of XRPL Labs.

Towo Labs’ talented team consists of just three software engineers: Markus Alvila (also the startup’s founder), Patrik Sletmo, and Silas Lenz.

Alvila explained via a blog post what this strategic investment from Xpring means support for the following two projects 

  • Supporting All XRPL Transaction Types on Hardware Wallets.

Towo Labs will be developing firmware support for all leading hardware wallets (including Ledger Nano S, Ledger Nano X, and Trezor T) to allow the owners of these wallets to sign any XRPL-supported transaction and not just XRP payment transactions, which is what we have now.

Alvila explains that full XRPL support means full XRPL will lets transactions “be prepared from untrusted devices and applications — for example, over the web — before being reviewed and securely signed inside a hardware wallet,” thereby enabling “new applications like trustless, non-custodial trading interfaces to the XRPL’s decentralized exchange, improved self-custody for DeFi applications and hybrid multi-signing schemes requiring signatures from both hardware and software wallets.”

  • New XRP Toolkit with Full Hardware Wallet Support.

The new version of XRP Toolkit will be implemented as a progressive web app (with offline support for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS) and will feature a user-centered design.

Alvila says that, as well as supporting signing transactions via the leading hardware wallets, it will also be possible to sign using Xumm, XRPL Labs’ signing platform Xumm.

Featured Image Courtesy of Towo Labs