The Blockchains, Part 9: The Ripple Blockchain
Ripple is the third biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization of over $12.5 billion. Widely adopted by the banking industry, this cryptocurrency has unique traits that we will discover in this article.
Arthur Britto, David Schwartz, Ryan Fugger of Ripple Labs, Inc have released the Ripple in 2012. Ripple cryptocurrency (XRP) has a total supply of 100 million pre-mined coins.
The XRP coins are released under the control of a smart contract. There are no miners involved. For transaction verification, a distinctive distributed consensus mechanism is utilized via a network of nodes. The consensus is reached by voting of the nodes, which allows fast decentralized verification. As there is no mining, there is nearly no electricity involved, which makes XRP more environmentally-friendly, than Bitcoin. XRP transactions also incur a minuscule fee, much lower than that of Bitcoin transactions.
55% of all coins are secured in a dedicated escrow account. Every month, one billion XRP coins are released to the market by the smart contract, and any unused coins are sent back to escrow by the end of that month. This scenario ensures against an excessive supply of the tokens.
In its essence, Ripple is a payment settlement, asset exchange, and remittance system similar to the widely used international SWIFT system. Due to its reliability, the Ripple system is being tested by a number of banks globally.
Emirex supports all the major blockchains, including Ripple. Come back soon to check out the next articles about the fascinating world of blockchains!
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Digital Commodities Asset Exchange in the Middle East, focusing on tokenised commodities. Licensed and Regulated. Tokenisation advisory.
