A warm welcome to another Let’s Simplify Things! post!
In this post let’s have a look in Ripple and try to simplify it.
Ripple Labs Inc is the company behind the Ripple payment protocol.
Since the initial 2012 release the goal of Ripple has been to create a global network for real time gross settlement, currency exchange and remittances.
To make it simple Ripple is trying to make it cheaper to exchange currencies and send assets globally securely and instantly.
Those assets can be of any form of unit that hold value.
The main ones of course are FIAT, cryptocurrencies, commodities and shares but can also be assets such as credit for mobile phones or frequent flier miles, etc.
The native coin of Ripple is XRP and currently it is the 4th most valuable coin.
From the 100 Bln coins available at the moment there are on circulation about 45bln.
The main benefits of XRP is the scalability and transaction time of the network.
It only takes 4 seconds for a transaction to be completed while in ETH it takes about 2 minutes in LTC about 10 minutes and in BTC about an hour.
It also can constantly handle 1500 transactions per second while ETH can handle 15 and BTC between 3 and 6.
There are hundreds of banks that have signed up but at the time being they are using just the Ripple XCurrent messaging technology as they are mainly afraid about the volatility of XRP among other issues.
To be honest I don't know of any that uses XRP, please feel free to let me know if any Bank uses it.
The only company I know it partially uses XRP is MoneyGram.
MoneyGram has started using xRapid, Ripple's XRP powered cross-border payment platform.
Keep in mind though that Ripple has invested millions of USD in MoneyGram.
You will notice that I mentioned partially uses XRP and that is because MoneyGram also uses FastSend which is powered by the Visa network.
The main issue is that Ripple Labs Inc is frequently selling big amounts of XRP and that has also been the complain of many investors.
There is also a class action lawsuit been going on the past 2 years, for which there is extensive coverage on the internet.
In that lawsuit the main question has been if the sale of XRP was a sale of unregistered securities or not.
The outcome of that lawsuit will definitely have a major effect in many other projects in the crypto space, if it is ruled that it was indeed a sale of unregistered securities!
So, to simplify it Ripple is trying to be the go-to place to send and receive any type of asset.
That said for the general public the currency exchange and the remittances are the two features I see to have any real usage on a major scale.
And yes there are indeed many serious competitors out there and yes Ripple is facing various issues but Ripple has managed to, so far, be ahead of the competition!
Finally, before saying goodbye I want to let everyone know that I have no sponsors, this post is not sponsored by Ripple or any other entity.
The above reflect my personal views and by no means should be taken as a recommendation to use or not use any service or equipment whatsoever!
Please feel free to make any suggestions or comments especially on what you would like to see next being simplified!
Until the next post....
Thank you all from the bottom of my heart!
