
Ripple is a distributed payment system within which the same crypto currency (XRP) is used as an internal payment unit.
Released in 2012, Ripple purports to enable “secure, instant and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks.”
The Ripple technology is based on a completely different basis, a so-called “principle of trust“.
Simply put, “trusting” an entity in Ripple is saying that you treat their word as a substitute for money.
XRP have similar properties with BTC:
- Ripple is divided to a large number of decimal places after the decimal point;
- It is also easily transmitted in electronic form and has high cryptographic stability;
- Interchangeable and homogeneous;
But also XRP has advantages over BTC:
- Transactions in the network are much faster;
- Ripple has some intrinsic value. Ripple is a private corporation with privately held equity/shares – this is where the intrinsic value of Ripple lies, and not in the XRP token;
- Ripple coins are deflationary, as they are destroyed by the network after the transaction is carried out and the total number of XRPs decreases with time;
As of 2017, Ripple is the fourth crypto currency in terms of market capitalization, second only to Bitcoin and Ethereum.