Today, Ripple is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges by market cap. However, Ripple Labs, the company behind Ripple and its native cryptocurrency token, has been around since 2012 and was one of the early pioneers of the blockchain space, second only to Bitcoin and even before Ethereum.
The network is designed to be faster, cheaper, and more scalable than Bitcoin, and aims to facilitate financial transactions as a bridge currency.
Since the use case of the digital token #XRP is largely designed to meet the needs of banks and other financial institutions as an efficient global payment system, the blockchain ledger is centralized, and there is no mining of #XRP .
Key points
🔴 Ripple and its cryptocurrency XRP are one of the leading cryptocurrencies in the field of payments and among the top 10 cryptocurrencies in terms of market value.
🔴Using a quorum-based consensus protocol, transactions on Ripple take between 3 and 5 seconds compared to 10 minutes for Bitcoin.
🔴 Ripple is a very attractive option for financial institutions in global payments, using XRP as a bridge currency for foreign exchange transactions.
Ripple History
Ripple was first founded in 2004 as RipplePay in Vancouver, Canada by Ryan Foger as a way to securely move money around the world. In 2012, Foger sold the company to Jed McCaleb, Arthur Brito, and David Schwartz, who turned the company into a cryptocurrency network called OpenCoin. McCaleb, the former founder of the failed cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox, left the company and split Ripple into Stellar in 2013.
The company was renamed Ripple Labs in 2013, and in 2015, it was finally shortened to just "Ripple."
