Buy Ripple USA (XRP Buying Guide)

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What is Ripple?

The name Ripple is primarily used to talk about the cross-border payment system and network, that has its own payment protocol. Ripple is also the name of this network’s native digital coin, commonly abbreviated as XRP. These cryptocurrencies keep the network running and protect it from any spam activities.

As a developing payment network, Ripple’s vision is for value to be exchanged as quickly and easily as information, a concept known as the Internet of Value.

What Are Their Future Goals?

In the last century, we have seen waves of innovation in both transport and communication. Just think about how the airline industry has made the transportation of goods and passengers across the globe easier and ten times faster, providing services to almost every corner of the world. Then we had the World Wide Web that has made the world seem like an even smaller place, one where information goes viral within seconds.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that many companies have expanded their services into foreign markets. This has helped them grow their business exponentially, but on the flip side, the financial industry hasn’t been able to keep up with the phenomenon of market globalization. Companies are still dealing with an outdated international payment system.

The most common issue with these payments is that they require a number of intermediaries, i.e. other banks that would link the origin with the destination bank. These banks charge high commission fees and lengthen the time needed to complete the transaction. They control the whole process and are allowed to halt the transfer under suspicion. And let’s not forget the high exchange rates too.

The team at Ripple believes that it can leverage the blockchain technology to enable faster, cheaper, and more reliable cross-border payments for individual and institutional users. They think that this will bring rise to new industries, connect people worldwide, and provide financial inclusion for the high percentage of underbanked consumers.

Who Created Ripple?

Jed McCaleb is a well-known figure in the crypto world, a software engineer whose ideas lie behind the creation of some of the biggest crypto projects like eDonkey and Overnet. He was a co-founder of one of the first crypto exchange platforms called Mt. Gox. After a couple of years, he sold the platform to Mark Karpeles, who was in charge when the infamous hacking attack on Mt. Gox shook up the whole crypto industry.

In 2011, McCaleb and business executive and angel investor Chris Larsen approached Ryan Fugger, who in 2004 had created a payment system called OpenCoin. OpenCoin was something like a precursor to blockchain technology that was also based on mining as a means of verifying transactions. McCaleb proposed switching to a community consensus and designing a protocol for direct money transfers.

That’s how OpenCoin was transformed into Ripple in 2012. The team realized that it would be a good idea to launch a native currency as well, to provide the necessary liquidity, and that’s how XRP came to existence.

However, due to some misunderstandings, in 2014, McCaleb and another colleague, Joyce Kim, left Ripple and went on to found The Stellar Development Foundation, one of Ripple’s current rivals.

Right now, Ripple is the third cryptocurrency by trading volume, third only to Bitcoin and Ethereum as the two oldest and most popular digital coins. Its current value according to CoinMarketCap is $0.27, a price that the coin has kept more or less the same since 2017 when it experienced a major price increase, jumping from $0.01 to $0.30. This happened as a result of wider bank adoption and speculations surrounding the network.

Some of the acclaimed venture capital firms and investors that support Ripple are Accenture, CME Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Core Innovation Capital, Santander Group, Tetragon, Standard Chartered, Seagate Technology, and others.

Who Is It For?

Ripple is for people who are interested in the crypto market, as well as those who belong to larger corporations. It might not radically change the way you send and receive payments but it aims to revolutionize money circulation on a global scale.

Its native currency is by no means a substitute for Bitcoin or designed to be its competitor. Even though they use the same technology, they’re created for completely different purposes.

Ripple’s network, RippleNet, offers three main services: xRapid, xCurrent, and xVia. The first one allows banks to convert their funds into XRP and use them to make international transfers at just a fraction of the regular fees. XCurrent also offers cross-border bank payments but not in XRP, with an option to track their money until they’ve reached their destination. The last one, xVia, has an interface that combines the other two services and introduces some more advanced features.

Regardless of the currency in question, Ripple supports all units of value – fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies, and commodities.

Ripple’s Pros and Cons

Ripple’s open-source platform has been serving its customers for almost 8 years now and has proved to be secure and reliable. All XRP tokens have been pre-mined so there’s no risk of inflation.

The advantage of Ripple over Bitcoin is that it can handle an incredible amount of transactions per second. While Bitcoin can process only 15 transactions per second, the XRP ledger outperforms it with up to 1,500 transactions per second! They’ve managed to achieve the same production rate as VISA which is the largest payment processor ever.

What makes Ripple so trustworthy is the fact that it works shoulder to shoulder with financial regulators, banks, and governments. It’s supported by the following banks: Santander, Yes Bank, Union Credit, Axis Bank, Westpac, NBAD, UBS, and more.

However, this calls into question Ripple’s decentralization and transparency. For one thing, Ripple Lab used to hold over 80 billion XRP tokens, and they get to decide when to release more, but we can also argue that even if the company ceases to exist, there will still be XRP tokens around.