Ripple

What is Ripple? 

• XRP is a digital asset built for payments. It is the native digital asset on the XRP Ledger—an open-source, permissionless and decentralized blockchain technology that can settle transactions in 3-5 seconds.
• XRP is a centralized and private blockchain as XRP cannot be mined or verified in the traditional sense. Only banks or certain entities can verify the transactions, thus there are only some groups of people who control the account and release the token.
• In May 2015, Ripple had frozen the account worth 96 million XRP of Jed McCaleb indicating that Ripple apparently has the ability to control any accounts and eventually led to a litigation.
• Ripple’s transfer concept is different from other cryptocurrencies as when there is a Ripple transaction, a certain amount of XRP is burned in this process as a fee.

Key Metrics

Ticker	XRP
Token Name	Ripple
Token Type/Protocol	XRP Ledger Consensus
Total Token Supply	99,990,461,026 XRP
Current Circulating Supply	See Coinmarketcap
Market Capitalisation	See Coinmarketcap
Token Creation Date	2012
Can it be mined?	No

Who is behind Ripple?

In 2012, Jed McCaleb, founder of Ripple Labs, Inc. created the XRP token and left in 2014. Chris Larsen now holds the position of executive chairman for Ripple’s director board.
Originally, the token was named Opencoin and was renamed to Ripple in 2015.

What is the purpose of Ripple?

XRP was created for international payments on a public ledger which runs the system on the decentralized network. Ripple’s transfer concept is different from other cryptocurrencies as when there is a Ripple transaction, a certain amount of XRP is burned in this process as a fee.

Insights:

• Ripplenet is a network of institutional payment-providers among banks i.e.

• Santander (Financial services company)
• Axis Bank (Private banking company)
• Yes Bank (Private banking company)
• Westpac (Private banking company)
• Union Credit
• NBAD (National Bank of Abu Dhabi)
• UBS (investment banking company)

• Ripple transactions are fast due to the absence of Proof of work and Proof of stake. Banks and some entities verify the transaction, making it faster compared to other traditional payment methods of cryptocurrencies. 
• Ripplenet or Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP) is a network-based gateway bridging between multiple institutions including banks, government agencies and several companies to join and make transactions within the network.

Risks:

• Since XRP is centralized, the transaction is potentially controlled and intervened by a certain entity in different ways such as freezing the account (personal wallet), world-wide pausing or shutting down the transactions.  
• XRP doesn’t have any validator and can only be validated by banks or some specific entities affecting the reliability of the token.
• The services of Ripple support only B2B such as government agencies, institutions, and large companies.

News and Updates:

• Flare Networks aims to be a new scalable and secure blockchain network which enables smart contract functionality and access to decentralized finance (DeFi) initially with XRP and Litecoin (LTC) followed by Bitcoin. Flare announced earlier this year that Spark token will be airdropped to XRP holders in Q2 of 2021.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charges Ripple and two executives with conducting a $1.3 Billion unregistered digital asset securities offering. This lawsuit caused a major drop in XRP price and some exchanges in the States even suspended XRP trading and removed the token from their platforms.

Community & Whitepaper Links:

Official Website: https://ripple.com/ 
White Paper:  https://whitepaper.io/coin/ripple 

Disclaimer: 

All investment is speculative and involves substantial risk and uncertainty. Investors should understand the nature of digital assets including the terms of return and the risk of assets. We encourage investors to fully understand the assets and the risk associated with them prior to making any investment.