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What is Ripple?

Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network created by American technology company Ripple Labs Inc. Ripple is not primarily a cryptocurrency. Rather, it is a digital payment network and protocol based on a decentralized peer-to-peer platform. This is what sets it apart from other cryptocurrencies. Released in 2012, Ripple is based on a distributed open source protocol that supports tokens representing fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies, commodities or other units of value.

Ripple claims to enable “secure, instant and virtually free global financial transactions of any size, with no chargebacks”. The ledger uses a native cryptocurrency called XRP.

Instead of using traditional blockchain mining methods, the Ripple network uses a unique distributed consensus mechanism. To validate transactions, participating nodes vote to verify the authenticity of the transaction. This happens almost instantaneously, enabling rapid confirmation without the need for a central authority.

Ripple has been used by some of the world’s leading banks and financial companies. Due to the speed of payments, the stability of the technology, and the ability to graft bridge currencies together  as a common standard, gradually becoming a common standard transaction protocol used by the world’s major banks now.

At the beginning of Ripple 100 billion XRPs were created, which according to the rules of the protocol is the upper limit of the currency. This means that the total amount will not exceed this amount, and of the 100 billion created, 20 billion XRP were retained by the creator, while the remaining 80% were given to Easy Access Quick Lab for sale.

XRP is a cryptocurrency designed to facilitate transfers between financial institutions. the project behind XRP, Ripple, differs from Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC) in several key ways, relying on sales rather than mining to unlock new currency, and its transaction speed varies in size (nearly 1,000 transactions) per second. the idea behind XRP dates back to 2004, and Jed Caleb and Chris Larsen created the currency in 2012.

How do I get XRP? Due to the nature of Ripple, unlike other digital currencies such as Bitcoin, it can not be obtained by mining, meaning there is no specialized mining machine ASIC or graphics card (GPU) miner dedicated to mining XRP, as it does not generate data by calculating the results through arithmetic power and consuming energy. So Ripple cannot be obtained by mining.

How can we get it? Usually the most direct way to get it is by purchasing it directly, which is usually done on a digital currency exchange.

First you need to download the Ripple wallet and sync it to the latest creation to generate your own XRP wallet address for storing records, but generally digital exchanges or provide you with a wallet address for each currency for you to use.

The second method is also to use other digital currencies you have to exchange into Ripple coins, such as Ether (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), Monroe (XMR), etc.

The third is also some commercial activities as rewards will be issued in the form of airdrops, candy, etc. to obtain. As for some of the so-called Ripple mining tutorials on the internet are nothing but the so-called mining rewards in the form of the third one.

In December 2020, Ripple Labs and two of its executives were sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for selling XRP tokens, which the SEC classifies as unregistered securities.

The workflow of the Ripple system is as follows: using the gateway or Ripple XRP as a bridge, user A converts any category of currency or virtual currency into Ripple XRP and sends it to user B in any other region, who can convert the funds received into any currency currency he needs; there is another model in which user A will deposit the funds at a gateway trusted by B, and after the gateway transfer to B. The Ripple system also allows users to issue “private currencies” within the system.

If a Ripple user A is in good standing, A can exchange his or her issued “private currency” for other currencies such as USD or Bitcoin with another user B who trusts him or her (user A) and willing to accept it; user B can redeem the currency exchanged to A as needed. This is effectively a lending process, where user A has the power to borrow from others to finance the process.

In terms of the overall structure of the Ripple system, it is a “decentralized” architecture. While it appears to be “weakly centralized” in parts (e.g., gateways and users), the overall architecture is Decentralized”. In short, it is a decentralized Internet financial transaction system that covers the full range of currencies.

The Ripple protocol maintains a network-wide public, distributed ledger. The protocol has a “consensus mechanism” and an “Verification mechanism”.  “Consensus mechanism” through transaction records are added to the ledger in a timely manner. The Ripple system generates a new instance of the ledger every few seconds, and the new transactions generated within these few seconds are quickly verified according to the “verification mechanism”.

Such sub-ledgers are arranged chronologically and linked together to form the general ledger of the Ripple system. Ripple’s “consensus mechanism” allows all nodes in the system to automatically receive updates to the general ledger transaction records within seconds, without going through a central data processing center. This extremely fast processing is a major breakthrough for the Ripple system.

Compared with Bitcoin’s data record packing method and transaction confirmation method, the Ripple system has two differences: first, the transaction record (block) packing speed is faster (Bitcoin about ten minutes, while Ripple only a few seconds), and second, the transaction record (block) confirmation method is faster (Bitcoin to multiple nodes to confirm one by one, while Ripple is all nodes together at the same time, that is, for Ripple’s. consensus mechanism”). So the confirmation time for a new transaction record in the Ripple system takes only 3 to 5 seconds, while Bitcoin typically takes 40 to 50 minutes.

There are only 100 billion Ripple coins (XRP) in total and all of them have been issued, but only 40% are currently circulating in the market, the rest is owned by the founding company that owns Ripple. Each month Ripple releases up to 1 billion XRPs to the market and recycles any unused XRPs.

Written by Terry

I currently work for ComeMarkets. I specialize in writing articles about the crypto market.

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