Ripple

Ripple was co-founded by Jed McCaleb and Chris Larsen and was debuted in 2012 as both a digital disbursement network and a pre-mined digital coin denoted as XRP.

Possessing less market cap than both Bitcoin and Ethereum, Ripple ranks as the third-largest cryptocurrency.

Its dual open-source and peer-to-peer (P2P) decentralized platform whose network is capable of working with any form of money such as GBP, Ethereum, Yen, etc.

What is Ripple Used For?

Known as a gateway, participants of Ripple may send and receive currencies to public digital address codes through the Ripple network.

You can think of a gateway as a payment intermediary for Ripple.

Serving as a bridge currency, XRP allows for a seamless exchange of any currency (fiat or cryptocurrency) due to each currency possessing its own gateways such as BitPay, CoinsBank, Blockonomics, and CoinGate.

Unlike Bitcoin, the Ripple network does not support proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS) systems.

Instead, a consensus protocol is employed to authenticate and verify that each transaction and account balance match.

This ensures the integrity of the Ripple network while lessening the risk of double-spending, all while these confirmations take no longer than 4 seconds to complete.

Ripple’s IOU gateway is similar to the traditional banking systems, where contractual obligations are upheld while the potential of transactions defaulting is a constant variable with counter-party risk.

Coincidentally, banks are said to be increasing their usage of the Ripple payment system while its market cap shows evidence of its value and demand.

All transactions performed over the Ripple network are logged and may be seen on the Ripple consensus ledger. For trading, XRP is generally traded in the form of CFDs.