Have you ever wondered what Ripple is? It is both an open-source platform for cheap financial transactions and a digital currency (it is pre-mined and called XRP). You can also use Ripple to create a cryptocurrency of your own. Co-founded by Jed McCaleb and Chris Larsen, it was released in 2012, though the working protocol prototype went live in 2004. Today Ripple is the third-largest cryptocurrency with only Ethereum and Bitcoin outperforming it.
According to its website, Ripple was designed to help people “break free” from the old financial networks, to let behind banks, high fees, credit cards, and processing delays. XRP itself works as the medium of exchange for cryptocurrencies and fiat money. It operates within a decentralized peer-to-peer network that allows smooth money transfer, be it litecoin, bitcoin, Yen, or USD.
In short, Ripple uses a Gateway that links two parties that want to make a transaction. It acts as the intermediary that receives and sends money in the Ripple network. Anyone can register a gateway, which then will be authorized transfer payments from one public address to the other. Some say that XRP is a Joker card that can be a substitute for anything you want to exchange. The average transaction cost on Ripple is only $0.00018, and after every transaction, this amount ‘disappears’ from the platform to prevent spammers attacks. This fee, though insignificant for regular users, can be costly for those who are trying to attack the network with bulk transactions.
To confirm transactions, Ripple exploits a group of servers and a consensus algorithm. Ripple is super fast and can process up to 1500 transactions per second (and the company claims it can be scaled to 50,000 per second). While doing that, it uses less energy than Bitcoin. To give you a clue, Bitcoin can handle no more than seven transactions in an equivalent amount of time.
Another interesting fact about Ripple is that developers created 100 XPR coins at the very beginning, but only about 40 billion are in circulation at the moment. Ripple Labs holds the remaining 60%, 55 billion of which are in escrow accounts for future distribution.
Now, we guess it is safe to say, that beyond any reasonable doubt, you know what Ripple coin is, what is ripple crypto, and what is XRP.
