Mar 30th 2023

The native cryptocurrency of the Ripple network is called XRP. Based on its market capitalization, XRP consistently places within the top ten. Ripple is a money transfer network that was developed specifically to cater to the requirements of the financial services industry. How does all of that work? Is it worth investing in?

What Is Ripple?

The company that created XRP is called Ripple, and it operates a global currency exchange network and payment settlement system.

“Ripple was designed from the very beginning to essentially be a replacement for SWIFT (a leading money transfer network) or to otherwise replace the settlement layer between major financial institutions,” says Pat White, CEO of Bitwave.

It acts as a trusted intermediary between two parties in a transaction because the network can quickly verify that the transaction was successful. Ripple can help with exchanges for many different fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies, like, Bitcoin, Ethereum and other.

Every time a user uses the network to conduct a transaction, the network deducts a small sum of the cryptocurrency XRP as a fee.

“The standard fee to conduct transactions on Ripple is set at 0.00001 XRP, which is minimal compared to the large fees charged by banks for conducting cross-border payments,” says El Lee, board member of Onchain Custodian.

What Is XRP?

Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, and David Schwartz created the XRP Ledger, a digital ledger for the cryptocurrency XRP. They later founded Ripple, using XRP to make transactions faster.

XRP works differently from most cryptocurrencies. Typically, anyone who can quickly solve complex math problems can help verify transactions. Also, most ledger holders need to agree to add a transaction. This process keeps transactions secure.

Ripple uses XRP and controls it through a consensus protocol. Anyone can use its software, but Ripple provides a list of trusted nodes. Users choose these nodes to verify their transactions, reducing fraud risk.

Every three to five seconds, as new transactions are received, the validators update their ledgers and compare them to those of the other validators. When there is a discrepancy, they pause to determine what went wrong. This offers the network an advantage over other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin by enabling the network to validate transactions securely and effectively.

“Bitcoin transaction confirmations may take many minutes or hours and are typically associated with high transaction costs,” says Lee. “XRP transactions are confirmed around four to five seconds at a much lower cost.”

You can buy XRP as an investment (top crypto to invest), as a crypto to exchange for other cryptocurrencies (the best crypto exchanges) or as a way to finance transactions on the Ripple network.