XRP Price

What is Ripple?

Ripple is a cryptographic payment network that aims to provide a new way of transferring funds between financial institutions.

Its goal is to migrate today’s banking transactions into a more open and transparent infrastructure, while also improving their speed. Additionally, Ripple aims to improve today’s outdated banking systems by connecting them within a single network for exchanging value.

To that end, the XRP ledger technology provides a frictionless medium for cross-currency transfers, by allowing any asset type to be transferred via its network.

As a result, Ripple has garnered over 300 industry-leading partners in the financial world over the years, including Moneygram, Santander, and the Bank of America.

Ripple, XRP, and the XRP ledger

When we talk about Ripple, we need to make a distinction between three different entities forming its ecosystem:

• Ripple - which is the company behind the project. The company has been rebranded numerous times in its history. It started out as OpenCoin in 2012, only for its name to be changed into Ripple Labs in 2013. Finally, the name was simplified into Ripple in 2015.

• XRP ledger - which is the software that runs the transactions of the network.

• XRP - is the native cryptocurrency of the network, which can be either used to pay the fees on the network or exchanged for its value.

How Ripple works

Ripple doesn’t rely on popular consensus protocols such as Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS). As such, new XRP coins cannot be mined by validating blocks, but are released in circulation regularly until their final number reaches 100 billion units.

The Ripple network consists of computers called validators, which hold a copy of a decentralized ledger and check the authenticity of each transaction on the network. Banking partners can act as gateways to support companies that want to use the functionalities of the network.

Ripple offers two different ways of transferring value over its network:

• IOUs - any participant on the network can issue an IOU which represents something they owe to another RippleNet user. It is worth noting that the IOU is not an asset in itself, but a representation of debt. IOUs can be issued for any type of real-world assets, such as FIAT, commodities, or even other cryptocurrencies. By using this feature, financial institutions can seamlessly transfer money through instant, low-cost, and cross-border transfers.

• XRP - the RippleNet protocol supports a native cryptocurrency that helps with transfers over the network. To eliminate the trust issue of IOUs, banks can convert their funds into XRP and send them to each other over the network.

Finally, RippleNet has no transaction fees. Instead, whenever a transaction is made between parties (IOU or XRP), a small amount of XRP is destroyed and taken out of circulation.

Who invented Ripple?

The creation of Ripple and XRP cannot be signed off to a single founder. However, most agree that the initiator of the project was Jed McCaleb, an American entrepreneur, programmer, and founder of the now-defunct Bitcoin exchange MtGox.

Together with programmers David Schwartz and Arthur Britto, McCaleb created the Ripple protocol in 2012. Shortly after, they were joined by Chris Larsen, who was appointed the CEO of the company which became known as OpenCoin.

Following disagreements with the rest of the board of directors, McCaleb moved on from Ripple to create another popular cryptocurrency project - Stellar.

Ripple price today

Cryptocurrencies are volatile assets and having accurate XRP price information is crucial when making investment decisions. For this reason, Paybis provides you with a Ripple price chart where you can consult the price of Ripple at any time of day.

Thanks to this Ripple chart, you can easily visualize all price fluctuations of the coin. Equally, you can consult important metrics such as the current Ripple price and the highest price in the last 24 hours.

Finally, by using the drop-down menus on the top of the chart you can also:

• Choose one of the 3 popular exchanges to view the Ripple price live.

• Select different timeframes to compare the Ripple price today with past price action.

• Check the value of the Ripple price USD as well as dozens of other FIAT currencies.