Pre-requisite
Tech Stack
problem

🪙 RippleNotes - Marketplace of Tokenized Receivables

Built for the Ripple × Divhacks Challenge — Building on the XRP Ledger

🚀 Inspiration

My uncle ran a Japanese restaurant called "Kaubki" in brandon, Florida where I grew up. It was a small business. I am very fond of this memory where I hung out with my nieces and nephews at the restaurant and I also worked during weekends as a dish washer.

He was an excellent sushi chef, but maybe not a good businessman. He had poor management of cash inflow, maybe it wasn't his fault, he did heavy on catering for businesses. However, the businesses groups of Korean people from Korean Internaitonal Company he catered to always came behind the payment schedule, sometimes months behind and he had to follow up with them on phone very frequently.

I always liked my uncle but he became angry and infuriated when he was trying to make those follow-up calls and tried to have aunt to do it.

One day, he was drained out of cash on hand and he stopped paying his vendor for months. The vendor was supposed to deliver a 200 pounds of Tuna that he makes sushi and sashimi with. The vendor did not deliver it, demanding immediate payment for a few months worth of payment delayed.

We had to close the business for 5 days straight because he could not run Sushi business without the tuna. Then, the business of the restaurant gradually died. A few years later, he closed the business and he became under a lot of debt. He and his family went to Alabama for a cleaning job, this memory still haunts me to this day. I'm still not sure the Korean company business people still paid their catering bills, but it was too late.

Small businesses have issue notes receivable or invoices but must wait months to get paid.
These receivables are illiquid and non-transferable — making short-term financing hard. Factoring receivables to collection agency comes with huge cost of 40 ~ 50% of the amount receivable.

According to Business Insider, one study by US Bank shows that 82% of small businesses fail because of cash flow mismanagement. According to US Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, small businesses employ 45.9% of American workers, 59 million people and make up 43.5% of Gross Domestic Product in US.

At the end, small businesses are the backbone and cornerstone of America. Marketplace for such receivables would increase the volume of the exchange, thus, it will increase the factoring conversion rate of the receivables compared to very low conversion amount done by collection agencies.

Moreover, the marketplace for receivables would give an open opportunity to retail investors. Currently, such market for receivables are done mostly by institutions like collection agencies. Investing and trading receivables would be a little more risk than traditional CDs or municipal bonds but the return would be higher than traditional CDs or municipal bonds while being less volatile than trading stocks.

Tokenized Receivables turns these contracts into tradable NFTs on the XRP Ledger, enabling lenders to sell, transfer, or endorse them instantly on-chain.

💡 What it does

Tokenized Receivables lets any user:

Mint a note receivable NFT containing:
- Maker / Holder contact info
- Principal amount, maturity date & amount
- Collateral description
List it for sale with a price in RLUSD (Ripple’s USD-stable token).
Accept Offers through GemWallet, transferring ownership on the XRP Ledger.
Notify Parties Automatically — FastAPI backend emails the maker & previous holder that the debt has been endorsed to a new holder.
Record Endorsement On-Ledger — Each transfer writes an AccountSet memo with a JSON payload proving the transaction history.

Every transaction can be independently verified on test.bithomp.com.

🧱 How we built it

Layer	Tech
Frontend / Marketplace UI	Next.js (React + TypeScript) + Tailwind CSS
Wallet Integration	GemWallet SDK — connect, sign, and broadcast XRPL transactions
On-Chain Logic	NFT Mint / Offer / Accept flows using XRPL JSON-RPC
Issued Currency Support	RLUSD IOU with automatic TrustSet creation
Decentralized Storage
Pinata + IPFS — we pin each NFT’s metadata (name, description, amount, maturity date, payer/payee) to IPFS and store the resulting CID on the Ripple Testnet, ensuring permanence and tamper-proof provenance
Backend Notifications	FastAPI + Python smtplib (Gmail SMTP) with full CORS support
Audit Trail	`AccountSet` Memos store signed endorsement JSON for permanent transparency

⚙️ Challenges we ran into

Handling RLUSD trustline setup directly from the frontend.
Synchronizing off-chain email notifications with on-chain NFT transfers.
Managing CORS policies between Next.js and FastAPI during local testing.
Parsing XRPL memos and ensuring metadata integrity across wallet versions.

🏅 Accomplishments we’re proud of

First live demo of tokenized notes receivable using RLUSD on XRPL testnet.
Seamless GemWallet UX for minting, listing, and accepting offers.
Automatic email endorsement alerts for legal traceability.
Public audit trail via on-ledger AccountSet memos — no smart contracts required.

📚 What we learned

XRPL’s native NFT and IOU model is ideal for real-world finance.
Stablecoins like RLUSD make settlement frictionless without DeFi complexity.
Even a simple memo transaction can act as an immutable digital endorsement record.
Web3 apps benefit from bridging on-chain immutability + off-chain communication.