Blockchains 101: XRP

TradingBull
3 min readDec 18, 2020

Serving Financial Institutions since 2013

Introduction

XRP is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency designed to be an alternative to existing payment platforms such as SWIFT. XRP is a direct and secure way to send payments over the web.

The main end users of XRP aim to be Financial Institutions and Banks. Ripple is the company and payment platform built around the XRP cryptocurrency which is used as money transmitter.

XRP was released publicly and officially launched in January 2013.

An XRP “Coin”

Description

Ryan Fugger was working on a company called RipplePay since as early as 2004 and handed it to Jeb Mac Caleb in 2011 (who built and sold the Mt Gox Exchange to Mark Karpeles one year earlier). Mac Caleb brought in Chris Larsen in 2012 as well as Arthur Britto and David Schwartz.

XRP runs on a digital payment platform called RippleNet, on top of a DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology = Database) called the XRP Ledger (open-source).

Ripple is the company operating and maintaining RippleNet, the payment platform using XRP as main medium of transfer for instant settlement of monetary transactions globally.

If XRP is the main cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger, any currency can be used to transact on the platform.

Transactions

The peer-to-peer XRP Ledger network consists of several independent XRP Ledger servers that accept and process transactions. Client applications sign and send transactions to XRP Ledger servers, which relay these candidate transactions throughout the network for processing.

Consensus

XRP Ledger relies on a network of trusted validators that propose and revise transactions sets to be included on the next Ledger version, based on whether or not the majority of other validators they trust have verified and included the same transactions to their own proposal.

XRP (wallet) client

Storage and wallets:

There a plenty of way to store XRP. The safest being to store it in a cold wallet (offline wallets such as paper wallet or hardware wallets) or hot wallet (such as mobile or desktop wallets) or by using a custody service that will store it on their own cold wallet/vault (thus limits the benefit of decentralization by involving a third party).

Official wallet: https://gatehub.net/

Technical specificities:

  • Type: Native Coin
  • Total Supply: 100,000,000,000
  • Subunit: 10–6 (drops)
  • Consensus: RPCA (Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm) — BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerant)
  • Encryption algorithm: SHA-512
  • Privacy: Pseudonymous (Low)
  • Smart contracts: no
  • Blocktime: 3–5 seconds
  • Coding languages: C++, Java
  • Open source: Yes
  • Current version: 1.0.0

Documentation:

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