Project Name: Ripple
Ticker: XRP
Website: ripple.com
Twitter: twitter.com/Ripple
Telegram: t.me/Ripple
Whitepaper: Click here for the whitepaper.
What Is Ripple?
Ripple is a blockchain-based payment protocol that allows fast and low-cost transactions in global payments. Ripple as an idea came about to reduce the waiting time for global money transfers and avoid high fees. Unlike its biggest competitors such as Western Union, SWIFT, and Visa today, Ripple provides money transfers within seconds with much lower fees. Ripple also ensures the security of transactions with its blockchain-based infrastructure.
What Does Ripple Offer?
Ripple describes itself as the best digital asset for global payments. A transfer can be completed in 3 to 5 seconds thanks to Ripple's open-source and permissionless decentralized blockchain. Bitcoin transfers take an average of 3600 seconds to be fully recorded, while Litecoin takes 600 seconds, Ethereum 120 seconds, and XRP 4 seconds. Moreover, 1500 XRP transactions per second can be processed, and the transaction fees ($0.0000346 per transaction) make XRP one of the cheapest blockchains. There are more than 150 validators on the XRP network, so the XRP network is considered decentralized.
Ripple’s Technology
What Is the XRP Ledger?
We can think of the XRP Ledger as the home of XRP. It allows anyone with a Private Key and an internet connection to make XRP transactions on the XRP blockchain.
The Ripple network has the following features:
Server: Any entity running the Ripple Server software, which takes part in the consensus process.
Ledger: A record of all transactions that occur on the network. The ledger is updated after each transaction goes through the consensus process.
Last-Closed Ledger: The most up-to-date ledger that contains the transactions that occur on the network.
Open Ledger: A version of the ledger that includes transactions, including those that have not yet gone through the consensus process. After the transactions in this ledger are confirmed, the open ledger becomes the last-closed ledger.
Unique Node List (UNL): Each server has a copy of a unique list of nodes that work to reach consensus.
The XRP Consensus Process
All valid transactions are aggregated by the servers, creating a candidate set. The candidate set is then sent to the Unique Nodes and queued for approval. If these transactions can get a certain percentage of "yes" votes, they are transferred to be included in the next ledger. The required percentage at this stage is 80%. With the 80% approval mechanism, transactions are confirmed even if Byzantine failures occur. If a Double Spending issue occurs, the first transaction is confirmed, and the second transaction isn’t confirmed because the assets have already been transferred. Therefore, Double Spending isn’t possible.
The Ripple Team & Company
XRP is not owned by Ripple. Ripple has handed over control of XRP to the community and offers enterprise solutions through Ripple.Net. The technology company Ripple Labs was founded in 2012 by Chris Larsen, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto under the name OpenCoin in California, USA. Ripple Labs originated from RipplePay, a payment system that Ryan Fugger worked on in 2004 that allows users on the network to transfer and borrow or lend money among themselves. Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb, who founded their own company in 2012 and worked on digital currency projects, contacted Ryan Fugger and offered to jointly develop and expand their similar projects.
Investment companies such as Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, and Accenture supported and funded Ripple Labs.
Brad Garlinghouse serves as CEO of Ripple Labs and David Schwartz serves as CTO. Asheesh Birla is the General Manager of RippleNet and Monica Long is the General Manager of RippleX.
Ripple’s Digital Asset Economy
XRP is the native token of XRPL (XRP Ledger).
The total supply of XRP is 100,000,000,000.
As of December 7, 2020, the circulating supply of XRP is 45.334.295.892.
At the launch, 20 billion XRP was distributed to its founders, and 80 billion XRP was allocated to Ripple Labs for development.
And for every XRP transfer, 0.00001 XRP is terminated.
Ripple Collaborations
Ripple works with more than 300 financial institutions in more than 40 countries. Today, major banks such as BNP Paribas, Japan Post Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, National Australia Bank, HSBC, UBS, UniCredit, and Bank of America are actively working with Ripple.
Evaluation of Ripple
Ripple acts as an intermediary for international payments with its network, Ripple.NET. XRP transfers are not affected by price volatility as they are recorded on the XRP distributed ledger within 3 to 5 seconds. When we consider all the data we have discussed in this article, we can say that Ripple is a project that has proven its success since 2014.
