What Is Ripple?

The name Ripple is gaining a lot of traction in the cryptocurrency world. It promises to fulfill transactions incredibly fast with minimal cost has caught the attention of some major players. Ripple.com lists Money Gram and American Express as one of their 200+ corporate customers. So, what exactly is Ripple?

WHAT IS RIPPLE?

The first thing you should remember is that Ripple is both a platform and a currency (XRP) in the same fashion as Ethereum is the name for the platform that facilitates trades in Ether. The Ripple platform is an open source protocol which is designed to allow fast and cheap transactions.

According to its website , the goal of the Ripple system is to enable people to break free of the “walled gardens” of financial networks like credit cards, banks, PayPal, and other institutions that restrict access with fees, charges for currency exchanges and processing delays.

Like other cryptocurrencies, Ripple is built around the idea of a distributed ledger network which requires various parties to participate in validating transactions, rather than any singular centralized authority. That facilitates the ability to make transactions all over the world, with an added benefit of transfer fees being far cheaper than the likes of Bitcoin. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, XRP transfers are effectively immediate, requiring no typical confirmation time.

SO WHY ALL THE HYPE?

Ripple solutions lower the total cost of settlement by enabling banks to transact directly and with real-time certainty, optionally using the digital asset XRP to further reduce liquidity costs.

According to the Financial Times, there are dozens of banks and financial services companies that publicly linked to Ripple, including UniCredit, UBS, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Westpac Banking Corporation, ReiseBank, CIBC, and others. Most of them stated that they “had not yet gone beyond testing” while a few had moved on to using Ripple’s systems “for moving real money.”

This makes Ripple the first digital currency to be adopted by mainstream financial institutions. And it’s only picking up momentum.

Q&A

HOW MUCH RIPPLE IS THERE?

The company plans to ultimately create 100 billion ripples. Half of those are to be released for circulation, while the company plans to retain the other half.

HOW MUCH IS A RIPPLE WORTH? 

Today, on Monday, January 14th, 2019 Ripple is trading at around 0.46 CAD. Keep in mind this is a 24/7 live market and pricing fluctuates in real-time.