Causing A Ripple … The Cryptocurrency Competing Against SWIFT

The current infrastructure for transferring payments across borders is the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) network. Often, though, the SWIFT infrastructure is slow and can involve transfers between several intermediate banks (each taking a transaction fee). The recent hacks of the SWIFT network [$81 million hack], too, has also shown that it is struggling to cope with securing the scope of its infrastructure.

So could the SWIFT network now have a serious competitor in Ripple? With SWIFT taking hours (or even days) to clear a transaction, Ripple clears within five seconds and can handle an equivalent throughput of the Visa network.

Causing a ripple

Ripple, created in 2012 by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb, has increased its value to around $12 billion.

But is it different from Bitcoin — which is a cryptocurrency — as Ripple (XRP) can also be traded as tokens. These tokens are pre-mined, so there is no need for a mining network. With an XRP token, the value is directly mapped to traditional currencies. Overall it can act as both a cryptocurrency and also as a payment network for transactions.

Currently, it has the third highest market capitalisation of the cryptocurrencies: