Ripple (XRP) Price and Analysis

Ripple Overview

XRP has grown to be one of the major success stories in crypto and has a large and active community of supporters backing it. Ripple was originally released in 2012 by Arthur Britto, David Schwartz, and Ryan Fugger, although the idea was born much earlier, in 2004.

Ripple refers to the payment network or exchange, a blockchain based payment solution for enterprise-level transactions; XRP is the cryptocurrency on the network. There is a maximum supply of 100 billion XRP, and it is divisible by 6 – this means that the smallest unit of XRP is one-millionth of an XRP. One of the co-founders, Fugger, had already developed a network called OpenCoin which would eventually transform into Ripple.

The FinTech company that is Ripple now works with over 90 banks worldwide, including 15 of the top 50. Why are banks working with Ripple? For some time Ripple has been focused on giving rise to an Internet of Value or IOV. The concept is that money or value should be able to move around fast, secure, cheaply and globally. Ripple’s value is in cheaper rates and faster transfer times for international payments, something which is extremely important to banks. International payments are settled with an average of 3 to 4 seconds with Ripple, and the ledger can process over 1,000 transactions per second.

CEO of Ripple Labs Brad Garlinghouse said:

“We are the only company in the space with real customers. [Our competitors] are still playing in the sandbox. And proof of concepts are not a business model.”

Where the philosophy of Ripple differs from that of other cryptocurrencies is the attitude towards banks.

Garlinghouse adds:

“We feel like to enable an Internet of value, you have to connect through repositories of value, and those are the banks. Where many in the bitcoin community have espoused a view of, ‘Down with the banks, down with fiat currency,’ Ripple has taken the opposite: we think the banks are critical to the future of an Internet of value.”

It’s fair to say that Garlinghouse doesn’t have a favorable opinion of Bitcoin, suggesting Bitcoin may become the Napster of digital assets.

“Napster lived in a world devoid of trademark law, and royalties, and tried to live outside of the rules, and you could say the same about bitcoin. I’m not predicting that bitcoin will go the way of Napster, but I would point out that bitcoin has demonstrated some very cool capabilities that, in the end, bitcoin may not be the best tool for.”

This attitude towards Bitcoin might reflect perfectly Ripple’s aspirations in the crypto space and in the financial market in general.