Steemit Crypto Academy | Season 2: week 1| @yohan2on| Altcoins – Part1 "Looking beyond the Bitcoin"

Here's my entry in respect of the task assigned by crypto professor @yohan2on
>Write about any one of the following Altcoins

• Litecoin (LTC)
• Ripple (XRP)
• Binance coin (BNB)

Ripple, discovered far back in 2012. It's an open-source protocol used as a distributed p2p payment system in finance.
It was developed to bridge the gap between payment providers, banks, exchanges, etc. via a blockchain network called RippleNet without chargebacks. Now it's a common misconception to assume the name Ripple stands alone for the cryptocurrency Ripple(XRP) but the term Ripple is used as an all-encompassing term to denote its virtual currency Ripple and its payment network RippleNet.

Ripple(XRP) intends to enable "secure, instantaneous and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks.

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CONSENSUS MECHANISM

Ripple adopts a consensus mechanism known as Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) which functions by connecting each node or server on the ripple network to a small number of other nodes. Validation of transactions using these consensus requires a fixed number of nodes to come to an agreement or reach a consensus that the block is not faulty before it can be added to the blockchain. In order to satisfy the agreement requirements, it must be shown that all nonfaulty nodes reach consensus on the same set of transactions without paying much attention to their unilock.network(UNL).

MARKET PERFORMANCE

Ripple (XRP) is ranked 4th on coinmarketcap with a large market cap of $72,642,416,139. The marketing capitalization is a metric of assessing a cryptocurrency derived by multiplying the circulating supply of a coin with its current price.

Possession of a large market cap improves the chances that a particular asset would remain relatively stable and experience fewer price fluctuations and volatility. Market capitalization is used to determine the growth potential of a network

TRANSACTION SPEED

Aforementioned, we stated that Ripple was created to tackle the problem of slow transaction time between participants hence it's no surprise Ripple (XRP) is lighting fast. Able to process about 10000 different transactions per second

SUPPLY

Ripple(XRP) has a total available supply of 100 billion XRP of which 45,404,028,640 XRP is in circulation. Hence the circulating supply constitutes about 45.4% of its max supply.

Ripple(XRP) can't be mined hence it has a fixed supply. As a result of the need to maintain control and also limit investor concerns, a number of around 55,000,000,000(billion) XRP are held in an encrypted account.

LEDGER TYPE

Ripple adopts a permissioned ledger type, which means prior approval is required before usage. Here various dynamics are employed in the determination of how decisions are made on a central level. Governance is decided by the members of the network. This ledger type offers better scalability and high customizability with clearly defined governance structures.

LIQUIDUTY AND VOLUME

Trading volume is a metric that also helps determine liquidity. It represents the total value of an asset that has been traded within a given time period.

As at the time of making this post Ripple(XRP) 24-hour trading volume is $16,449,869,016 with about 10,098,483,350 XRP traded during this period.

Liquidity is used to ascertain how easily an asset can be bought or sold. A liquid asset would have no problem selling at its trading price while in the case of an asset with an illiquid market, there exists an inability to sell assets at fair prices.

In determining the liquidity of the Ripple(XRP) market. I'd make use of the bid ask spreak for the period. A bid ask spread is the difference between the lowest price a seller is willing to accept on a sell order and the highest price a buyer is willing to offer on a buy order.

With respect to the depth chart above. We observe the spread is at -0.5%. A lower spread indicates a higher liquidity.
Bid-price - 1.57824
Ask-price - 1.57855

The stray between both prices is not too far off hence it'd be easier to sell assets at fair prices.

SHORTCOMINGS

Ripple(XRP) has had a few shortcomings on its part. Firstly, Ripple isn't really as distributed as it claims to be. As a result of its pre-mined nature, little to no incentives exists for common nodes to function in a network which leaves the corporates and financial institutions its aimed at to offer the validator nodes, as a result of this only a few nodes are required to run the network.

Ripple has also been greatly criticized for its act of locking away a larger percentage of its supply on an encrypted account after its promise to pass a large percentage of XRP to users of the network. Ownership of a large percentage of its asset implies the company can control its price movement.

CONCLUSION

I've tried to tackle the homework task for this week. I would leave the assessment to the professors.
Thanks to the steemit team for this wonderful learning opportunity once again. It's been nice so far.
Thanks for reading my write up and thanks for your support

ps: my apologies for the poor post format, i am not familiar with the new text editor.
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