Among the thousands of crypto-currencies available on the market, ripple is one of the biggest fishes in the pond. But while ripple coins are famous, they’re not the main product of the company. Indeed, it’s their blockchain solution for global payments on which they built their notoriety. However, the ripple cryptocurrency is on the verge of booming. So in this article, I’ll explain: what is ripple?
Ripple coin, a digital asset for payments
These days, ripple (code XRP) is competing with ethereum to become the main contender for bitcoin. But what is ripple definition?
It’s an instant payment system, launched in 2012. And their network enables secure, instant and very low-cost transactions anywhere in the world. It’s a shared public database with an integrated distributed currency exchange. So it’s using the blockchain principles.
But unlike other crypto-currencies, it’s able to support any fiduciary currency, digital coin or any other unit of value. So you could even use it to exchange minutes for a mobile phone, for example.
The team of the project designed its protocol to route each transaction to the cheapest price available on the market.
A total of 100 billion XRP was created during the creation of ripple currency. And according to their white paper, no more XRP can be created. Funny to see how they’re dealing with scarcity: XRP coins used for transaction fees are destroyed. Therefore, the number of XRP in circulation is decreasing.
More than a hundred major banking institutions around the world are already experimenting with the digital coin. So it’s something with a lot of potentials.
The advantages of ripple cryptocurrency
As I said above, one of the main advantages is cheaper transaction fees. And of course, everybody’s looking for the cheapest fees. So it’s the main point for most users in the community.
Also, transactions are fast. Not lightning-fast, but much faster than its competitors. The team mentioned 4 seconds to settle a payment. But you need over 2 minutes to settle payment with ethereum. And it’s even worse for bitcoin with over 1 hour of transaction time…
Furthermore, everything’s scalable. And once again they’re crushing the competition, with the capability of handling 1,500 transactions per second (TPS). When ethereum can boast 15 TPS and bitcoin 3 to 6 TPS…
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Midas
Crypto enthusiast who started from scratch. After a few years of hits and misses, I'm sure cryptos will change the world for the better (if we can manage to protect our privacy). As I learn, I'm building a portfolio of as many coins and tokens I can collect, including mighty bitcoin. Because who knows what lies ahead of us? I hope my articles will help you get started!
