Situation of ripple

Ripple, a California-based start-up, uses blockchain technology to develop a payments network for banks and other financial institutions. The network participants use a digital coin called XRP for transactions. The cryptocurrency benefits from a four-second settlement time, versus more than two minutes for Ethereum and over an hour for Bitcoin.

Global acceptance

The company has received a lot of acceptance from global banks, with more than 100 financial institutions using its network.

The recent surge in price has been in light of several South Korean and Japanese banks beginning to testing Ripple for cross-border payments. In Japan, three of the major credit card companies signed up to use Ripple’s technology which triggered the bounce in the price of XRP.

Cryptocurrency community’s ire

However, the company receives ire from the cryptocurrency community largely because:

• The start-up owns 61 percent of the total XRP coins in existence
• There is a huge amount of coins issued - 100 billion coins
• Ripple works with banks, while the cryptocurrency enthusiasts aim to achieve a World that does not need banks
  (AC)