About XRP

Originally conceived in 2012 as a Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system aimed to reduce overheads while transacting from one currency to other, XRP has grown to be one of the most used cryptocurrencies in the world, with its market cap only second to Bitcoin at more than $121 billion, as of January 6th,2018.

Prior to its explosion and relevance in the larger cryptocurrency market, Ripple — the core product associated with XRP — was already used by banks as way of settling overseas dues without incurring significant charges. The currency is built upon an open-source protocol, also known as the Ripple Transaction Protocol, or simply Ripple Protocol.

Ripple is backed by several organizations around the world, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Due to Ripple using the shared public ledger in its working framework, the currency also has support among banks, with Unicredit, UBS and Santander among several others using Ripple in their intra-bank settlement infrastructure.

While Ripple uses the same shared ledger technology used by other cryptocurrencies, it is different to them in some aspects, which are:

• Ripple is designed for faster transactions with the lowest overhead costs.
• Ripple does not require mining as all of the total 100 billion XRP currency is already in circulation.
• The Bitcoin bridge which allows direct payments to Bitcoin users using their Ripple account.
• Ripple is accepted by a lot of banks around the world — reason behind the recent price surge.
• Transaction information on the shared public ledger is hidden.

Ripple continues to gain strength which was majorly fuelled by the cryptocurrency boom of 2017. 2018 has been kind to the currency, with its total market capitalization increasing by double-digit percentages in the first week itself.

The third largest cryptocurrency by market cap can be purchased with relative ease with the help of other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It can also be purchased using fiat currency on exchanges like Bitfinex and Bitstamp.

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