Some interesting history here for those new to the market.
Years ago Ripple hired a young Russian crypto-wizkid to work on Ripple's smart contracts platform Codius. The US state department turned down his work visa application and the young wizkid Vitalik Buterin went off to start his own little smart contract platform Ethereum. Ripple cancelled it's work on Codius and pivoted towards focusing on X-border banking. Just recently they have announced they are resurrecting the Codius project. They certainly ain't holding back. Compare that to the BTC core dev team that just bicker and plan and announce things that never happen and just string along the poor old crypto-anarchists like Earl.