Despite the emergence of cryptocurrencies, a lot of teething troubles with our financial systems remain. International payments are still slow and cumbersome, and the world, in general, isn’t warming up to compete with cryptocurrencies fast enough. This is of course because institutions aren’t picking up this new technology quickly. This is what Ripple intends to change with its XRP tokens.
The protocol builder of Ripple, OpenCoin was founded by CTO Jed McCaleb and CEO Chris Laren. Both of them were into Bitcoin previously, much like all other developers in the company.
Ripple cryptocurrency technology is rapidly being adopted by the banks due to its speed. Using XRP, banks can provide their clients with liquidity. This can be done in real time and on demand! It also eliminates the need of any pre-funding. It is also being rapidly adopted by several payment providers. They are using XRP in order to reach new markets. With XRP, they are able to reduce the time required for payment settlement and lower the foreign exchange costs.
Once you buy XRP tokens, you naturally need to find a safe place to store it. If you prefer storing coins in an online wallet, go for GateHub online Ripple wallet. Other options include the open-source and safe Toast wallet which hands over your private keys to you.
There is an offline wallet available to store your Ripple coins too. We’re talking about the widely popularly Ledger - known for its security. The other popular hardware wallet, Trezor too supports XRP tokens.
With a total market capitalization of $26 billion USD as of May 2018, and currently, Ripple XRP is the third largest cryptocurrency in the world. It has a maximum supply of 100,000,000,000 XRP tokens, with currently about 39,241,525,848 tokens in circulation.
The price of an individual Ripple coin is $0.68 USD. This is after some significant correction the token witnessed in the first half of 2018, along with the rest of the cryptocurrency market. Prior to this, XRP had continued to see a massive rise in prices, exceeding 10x returns within a matter of months on repeated occasions.
Also Read: Complete Analysis of Ripple | Live Ripple (XRP) Price Charts & Predictions
|
Date |
Open |
High |
Low |
Close |
Volume |
Market Cap |
|
June 01, 2018 |
0.612893 |
0.624824 |
0.609069 |
0.623364 |
263,088,000 |
24,019,200,000 |
|
May 01, 2018 |
0.838355 |
0.842069 |
0.797826 |
0.841407 |
630,809,000 |
32,818,400,000 |
|
April 01, 2018 |
0.513854 |
0.515437 |
0.466223 |
0.485081 |
297,869,000 |
20,088,900,000 |
|
Mar 01, 2018 |
0.904131 |
0.953796 |
0.890630 |
0.928347 |
475,257,000 |
35,346,800,000 |
|
Feb 01, 2018 |
1.16 |
1.16 |
0.930378 |
0.962530 |
1,410,420,000 |
44,971,500,000 |
|
Jan 01, 2018 |
2.30 |
2.39 |
2.15 |
2.39 |
1,894,230,000 |
88,945,900,000 |
|
Dec 01, 2017 |
0.250352 |
0.258828 |
0.239438 |
0.255699 |
182,992,000 |
9,669,290,000 |
Ripple is fairly different from almost all the other cryptocurrencies we see traded in today’s times. A couple of the most obvious differences stand out:
But wait, isn’t Bitcoin doing that too? Allowing us to transfer funds from one place to another easily?
Well yes, except that Bitcoin is finding it difficult to scale. Transactions are slow, and they’re expensive. This isn’t the case with XRP tokens - which allow transfer of funds within 4 seconds.
More importantly, the Ripple coin seems to be targeted at institutional markets - making it easier for banks to process payments and exchange value. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies have generally focused more on the end users or consumers.
Apart from the ups and downs throughout its journey, Ripple’s XRP has emerged as one of the largest and popular cryptocurrencies in the world. When popular exchanges like CoinBase were about to add Ripple to the list, it saw another price surge. Many users continue to flock to XRP because of the psychological impact of the lower price of an individual Ripple coin, making it seem affordable to many.
One unique feature is that the company itself owns most of the coins and there is no other way it can be mined. However, many may argue that this isn’t positive since it leads to concerns of centralization of power into one entity. To this, the Ripple developers have this to say:
“The Ripple network is an open network. No one, including Ripple Labs, can prevent others from using or building on the Ripple protocol as they desire. However, when Ripple Labs provides software, such as the Ripple Trade client, Ripples Labs may impose additional requirements for the use of the software. As such, Ripple Labs will require identification of Ripple Trade account holders.”
Keeping in mind the trends so far, Ripple has seen positive numbers at most of the times. In the first half of 2017, it saw almost 4000% rise in its price!
If Ripple fulfills its objectives and maintains its position in the market, would we soon see it becoming the largest cryptocurrency of the world?