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Bitcoin was created at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis as a potential replacement for the traditional financial system. Since then, most cryptocurrencies have followed the path of Bitcoin, creating solutions that can replace traditional systems. However, one company has decided to create a cryptocurrency that focuses on working together with the traditional financial system instead of pursuing replacement and decentralization. That crypto is called XRP.
XRP is a native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger network. It was designed to be a bridge between financial institutions that are swapping between multiple valuable fiat currencies.
You can use your XRP tokens in the following ways:
At the time of writing (May 16th, 2022), XRP’s price is $0.41. The current Market Cap ranking is #6, with a market cap of $20B.
XRP hit its all-time high price of $3.37 in July of 2018 but has since struggled to get back to the old price due to complications over the SEC Lawsuit. XRP prices during the years have mostly been sitting at around sub $1 prices.
Since its inception, XRP has averaged 211.5% year-on-year returns.
The initial supply of XRP was 100 billion, and it was distributed as follows:
Currently, there are 48.1B of XRP tokens in circulation.
XRP, one of the solutions that seek to enhance the financial system rather than replace it, has caught the eye of many people and investors. With a high supply available, the demand is increasing.
The primary way people buy their XRP is through centralized exchanges because they offer the ability to purchase them with credit\debit cards, which most people prefer.
Although significantly more complicated, the second way is through decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap. Decentralized exchanges usually require users to already have some cryptocurrencies in their wallets to buy other cryptos.
Finally, it can be purchased easily through a broker app such as our Veli App, where you can get your hands on some XRP in just a few taps on the screen.
Apart from having a team that consists of people with impressive backgrounds in the finance world, XRP was founded by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb.
They have both left the company, with Jed now being the founder and CTO of another similar project called Stellar.
The current CEO is Brad Garlinghouse, and the CTO is David Schwartz.
The XRP community is growing day by day. They are present on almost every popular social media channel and have a GitHub repository for the dev community that counts over 150 contributors.
Ripple has raised $293.8M in funding over 14 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Mar 1, 2021, from a Series B round. Investors include globally recognized Venture Capital firms and strategic investors.
Besides them, Azure Ventures Group, 10X Capital, SBI Investment, Route 66 Ventures, Tetragon Financial Group Limited, James Sowers, PMT Ventures, Secondary Market – Ripple, SCB 10X, Hinge Capital, Series B – Ripple, CRCM Ventures also have invested in this project.
In December 2020, the SEC charged Ripple with a lawsuit questioning whether Ripple’s token – XRP – is a security under the federal securities laws. They have charged Ripple and Two Executives with Conducting a $1.3 Billion Unregistered Securities Offering.
This lawsuit deeply affected the price and the project’s progress as the price plummeted after the lawsuit. Currently, the suit looks like it could go in the benefit of Ripple and XRP and that they could win the case against SEC, but it remains uncertain. The Ripple win against SEC would significantly benefit the whole crypto market and not only the XRP token. The XRP token price has been suppressed since the lawsuit.
Here we can take a look at the network activity of the XRP with some numbers.
XRP’s primary competitors are Ethereum and Stellar blockchain networks.
Ethereum is a competitor to XRP because it’s the world’s first programmable blockchain that allows users to create different kinds of applications for many different use cases. They mainly differ in terms that XRP is centered around worldwide payments between parties while Ethereum is a general-purpose blockchain network. XRP is also a lot faster and cheaper than the current version of Ethereum.
Stellar has been created by Jed McCaleb, a founder of XRP. They are competitors since it also focuses on the payment processing niche, the same as XRP. The main differences between them are that Stellar is two times faster than XRP and that Stellar has a partnership with IBM that aims to use the Stellar blockchain to process transactions with 12 regional banks in South Pacific. Finally, Stellar is an actual blockchain network, while Ripple is a blockchain-based payment network.
Here is a table with additional numbers that help illustrate the differences.
XRP | Ethereum | Stellar | |
Transactions per second | 1500 | 15 | 3000 |
Time needed to confirm a transaction | 4-5s | 6 min | 3-5s |
Average transaction fee | fraction of a penny | 15$ | fraction of a penny |
Market cap | $29.6b | $310b | $4.32b |
Circulation supply | 48.11% in circulation | No limit on the number of tokens | 49.55% in circulation |
Total number of wallet addresses | 71.4m | 150.6m | 6.8m |
Total number of daily active users | 76.31k | 509k | 51.7k |
Launch date | 2012 | 2015 | 2015 |
Average growth rate | 211.35% | 80.79% | 197.50% |
When it comes to investing, there are obvious risks, just as there are with any other asset type. Because there are so many different types of cryptocurrencies, risks may be divided into two categories: generic risks that apply to all cryptocurrencies and coin-specific risks.
We’ve put up a guide that covers broad cryptocurrency investment risks and provides advice on how to reduce them, while risks related to individual assets are handled specifically in coin guides such as this one.
Website: https://xrpl.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ripple
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ripple
Ripple is a significant crypto and digital currencies player with partnerships galore and robust financial backing. It’s designed to bridge the traditional banking industry gap and the new digital currencies age. As anyone who’s ever been gouged while sending an international money transfer will agree, it’s targeting a market sector that’s crying out for disruption.
But whether or not Ripple has the product to challenge the old guard of the world’s financial industry remains to be seen. With the current lawsuit against Ripple and XRP and much controversy around this project, the present and future are uncertain. If Ripple wins the case, the usage and XRP token price could increase. On the other hand, the XRP price could plummet if the lawsuit is lost.
