Everything you need to know about Ripple

What is Ripple

Ripple is called a cryptocurrency, but the way it works and runs is very different from other currencies like ‘BITCOIN’ and ‘LITECOIN’ .

Ripple doesn’t rely on energy-intensive ‘MINING’ in order to work or create new currency.

Instead, it created its currency all at once, and the people behind Ripple gradually sell it as and when they need to.

It also developed a method to help banks and other financial institutions move money faster and without fees rather than a way for people to buy goods and services.

Who Invented Ripple 🙋

The precursor to the Ripple we know today was first developed by Ryan Fugger, a web developer in 2004.

But it wasn’t until 2012 — and the work of Jed Caleb and Chris Larsen — that lead to what we now know to be Ripple.

A brief history

• 2004 — 💳Ryan Fugger developed Ripplepay in 2004 — a secure payment service
• 2011 — ₿ Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto and David Schwartz began work on a new currency system inspired by Bitcoin
• 2012 — 💱 Jed McCaleb, Chris Larsen and co merge their idea with Fugger leading to the creation of OpenCoin.
• 2013 — 🏗️ Jed leaves OpenCoin and the company changes its name to Ripple Labs
• 2014 — 🏦The first bank starts using Ripple to transfer money
• 2017 — 💸 In December, XRP briefly became the world’s second largest cryptocurrency with a value of $73 billion

What’s so special about it

There are two parts to Ripple: Ripple as a cryptocurrency (XRP), and Ripple as a company designed to help banks move money quickly and cheaply.

• 🏦 It’s a service for banks — Ripple has been helping banks connect to each other via its network.
• 💱 It bridges cryptocurrency and traditional banking — by using its own currency as a go-between to exchange dollars and pounds in to cryptocurrencies.
• 💨 It’s super fast at moving money. It only takes 3.5 seconds for money to be confirmed, and can process 1,000 transactions per second, the same amount of transactions as Visa can. Bitcoin, by comparison, can process just 7 transactions per second.
• 💸 It’s really cheap to move money — it’s a lot cheaper for banks to move money using Ripple than using existing technology.
• ⚡It uses less power — because no mining takes place, it’s more energy efficient
• 🎯It’s centralised — Banks act as nodes on the network, giving them more control over the network.

How is Ripple produced?

Ripple doesn’t involve miners and nodes in the same way as other currencies. Instead, it created 100 billion Ripples at the point of inception and has been steadily selling Ripples every month to help raise money.

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