The Main Features of Ripple Cryptocurrency

The idea behind Ripple (XRP) was initiated way back in 2004 when Ryan Fugger founded a company called “RipplePay”, almost half a decade before Satoshi launched Bitcoin. Now, Ripple is among the most valuable blockchain-based tokens by market capitalization.

According to The Ripple Story, the plan for the protocol behind Ripple cryptocurrency was to create a “peer-to-peer trust network of financial relations that would replace banks”, while working in the same fashion as blockchain technology works.

However, it is important to note that the Ripple crypto platform has its own features or characteristics that make it different from established traditional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Also important to note is the fact that the Ripple company and Ripple cryptocurrency are two different things, but they are connected to each other: some of the company’s (Ripple’s) payment systems are used with the Ripple crypto or coin which trades as “XRP”.

In 2011, Ripple’s target demographic started paying more attention to Bitcoin which was gradually becoming popular and performing much better than Ripple as a peer-to-peer payment network.

According to Ripple XRP Website, the XRP crypto functions on the basis of the cryptographic signatures inherent in a public chain.

Eventually, Ripple’s XRP cryptocurrency was launched in 2012 to serve as a digital payment network for financial institutions. Fast forward to more than half a decade later: between the end of 2017 and the beginning of January 2018, Ripple crypto temporarily ranked higher than Ethereum for ten days.

In fact, for the most part of 2018, in terms of market cap Ripple was the third largest cryptocurrency at approximately $19 billion.

Ripple versus Bitcoin

These are the main differences between Ripple crypto and Bitcoin crypto:

• Bitcoin is an open-source platform that is owned by a community: no particular person or entity controls or owns Bitcoin. On the other hand, Ripple is owned by a private company called Ripple Labs which has offices all over the world and brings a consensus into effect if it receives 80% support from users and partners within two weeks. Basically, although Ripple is owned by a company, it employs a democratic process to please at least the majority.
• Bitcoin’s transaction speed can take up to an hour, and the transaction fees can go as high as $40, depending on demand. On the other hand, Ripple transactions can take as little as four seconds. And even during times of high demand, Ripple’s transaction fees are relatively low or much less, as was the case in 2017 when transaction fees averaged $0.007 which is just a fraction of Bitcoin’s transaction fees.
• Around ten Bitcoin transactions can be made per second. For Ripple, the number of transactions could go as high as 1,500.
• Bitcoin and a number of other minable cryptocurrencies have a supply limit—the maximum number of coins that would ever be mined/minted or in circulation. The supply limit of Bitcoin is 21 million finite numbers of coins, while Ripple (XRP) is limited to the 100 billion coins currently in circulation.

The main features or characteristics of Ripple are as follows

• Ripple is not a fully decentralized platform.
• Transactions on the platform can be made anonymous.
• The token symbol for Ripple is XRP.
• Ripple is not minable or cannot be mined, and thus has no miners on its platform.
• Algorithm processing and coin creation occur by consensus mechanism—not by proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS)—to validate transactions and account balances on the system.
• Transactions times are small: transactions can occur within as little as four seconds.
• Ripple uses less energy than bitcoin and transactions costs are very small.

Because Ripple’s unique features are very different from Bitcoin’s features, some people believe that Ripple XRP is not a cryptocurrency. Actually, Ripple is a hybrid of a traditional or fiat currency (a currency that is backed by a government, such as the U.S. dollar) and a traditional cryptocurrency.