XRP (XRP)

Ripple (XRP) is among those few cryptocurrencies that took the market by storm and made their mark in a very short period of time. It doubles as an open payment network and a digital currency. The network aims to free the world from the binding chains of the current payment and financial network. In essence, it provides an alternative to banks, PayPal and credit cards by offering a cross border payment method while charging minimal fees for financial transactions.

As of now, the Ripple network is working on the release of three different products, namely xCurrent, xRapid and xVia. The company is now focussing more on xCurrent and this is the product that has more or less become the identity of the Ripple network. It aims to bring financial institutions like banks on board and allows cross border financial transactions in a faster, secure and cheaper way (Sinha, 2019).

Among the three products offered by the Ripple network, up till now, xCurrent is the most developed. It is a solution for cross-border payments, which as of now, are very time consuming and include high costs. Ripple offers instant transfers between borders and charges minimal fees. However, banks although very interested in the technology, are reluctant to use the RippleXRP token due to its high fluctuation, which has become a major issue for the Ripple Company.

The minds behind the Ripple technology are Chris Larsen and McCaleb. McCaleb is a competent, skilful programmer and has several ventures to his name. He founded the famous file sharing program eDonkey2000, which was put down by the regulatory authorities and he was forced to pay $30 million in compensation (Mennecke, 2006). Afterward, he created the website MtGox (which was hacked on June 2011 – USD 9 million were stolen). He later sold the website, while still holding a considerable amount of shares of it (McCormack, 2019).

McCaleb co-founded Ripple in 2012 with Larsen, but his term there was short-lived. He left the Ripple network in 2014 to start out his own cryptocurrency venture Stellar Lumens which is considered as a Ripple fork. Currently, Larsen is single-handedly leading the Ripple Team.

The Ripple Foundation is currently being lead by the CEO, Brad Garlinghouse. The team includes many experienced individuals with knowledge in both technical and financial services.

The company has rolled out the test version of the Ripple XRP token. There is not much information available in relation to the current state and progress of the product. However, the GitHub profile of Ripple looks very busy and seems like the team is working really hard to keep it upgraded and updated (Ripple Team, 2019).

The Ripple product xCurrent has a bright future in the crypto market. However, the success of the Ripple XRP token heavily depends upon recognition and acceptance by financial institutions as a token for transactional purposes. The main hindrance towards making the Ripple XRP acceptable is not only its high volatility and unstable behaviour, but also getting the bank to trust the technology. Financial institutions like banks might not be interested in giving full control of a very high-profile transaction to the Ripple network. What banks might be interested in would be to create an ecosystem of their own, with partnerships and collaborations with other banks in order to use the xCurrent technology. This would serve their purpose better.

There are no new projects in the company’s pipeline. They are currently focusing on the already announced products and much of the efforts are directed towards making it better and marketing of the technology, to attract businesses for partnerships and to attract potential investors for the Ripple XRP token.

The potential that this technology holds is exceptionally huge. For this very same reason, financial institutions are reluctant to promote the usage of Ripple because the network, if it becomes implemented, could damage the importance of the banking network. If the Ripple coin XRP is adopted by major banks, it would see a bright future.

Ripple’s first critique, which was a rather strong one is that the Ripple network is not decentralized. Ripple holds more than 50% of the total supply of RippleXRP tokens and thus can control the validation processes on the network. Obviously, with every other cryptocurrency offering a decentralized technology network, this was not welcomed by the public (Mix, 2018).

In December 2018, a detrimental story was uncovered by an independent researcher, Geoff Goldberg. According to the irrefutable evidence unearthed, it was alleged at some point that Ripple was using fake social media bots to lure the new users into developing an interest towards the Ripple network. This greatly damaged the reputation of the institute and further raised questions towards the integrity of the technology (Caldwell, 2019).

Ripple also made it into news, after the famous actor, Ashton Kutcher, donated $4 million to the DeGeneres Wildlife Fund live at the Ellen DeGeneres Talk Show through the Ripple network. He also stated that Ripple is an amazing technology and he himself has invested in this technology (TheEllenShow, 2018).

The Ripple community has one of the most active user communities in the crypto-world. This could be indicated when XRP made it to the list of top 10 cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization. The community has strengthened and indicators of high user activity and involvement are seen. The community promotes and shares recent information and developments to attract new people towards the technology.

Ripple has managed to get into a mutual agreement of partnerships with several businesses. On February 3, 2018, Ripple signed a mutual agreement with the multinational Spanish Bank, Santander Group. The bank will use and promote Ripple product xCurrent, but will not be using the Ripple XRP token for the transactional processes (Sokolov, 2019).

Another development in the making is the partnership with the Fleetcor Indusind Bank. They will be making use of the xCurrent technology but it is still unclear as to whether they will be making use of the Ripple XRP token or not (Jagati, 2018).

The biggest threat to the Ripple Network currently is Stellar Lumen. Stellar was created by the co-founder of Ripple, McCaleb, and is evidently a forked (copied) version of the Ripple technology.