Let's look at some Ripple history.
Note what is a #Ripple in waves?
A ripple in time?
#Synchronicity? You decide!
Three blockchain OGs go round the outside
Ripple’s beginning, believe it or not, dates back to 2004 when it was developed by software developer Ryan Fugge. It was initially a payment transfer system known as OpenCoin that provided secure payment options to members of an online community via a global network. When Jed McCaleb (founder of the now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange), Arthur Britto and David Schwartz joined the team in an attempt to build their own solution to compete with Bitcoin’s - it led to the birth of Ripple in 2012.
At its core, Ripple is focused on advancing the world of payments, especially cross border payments, which has historically proven to be fragmented and slow. Ripple aims to take on traditional institutions by providing a more efficient system for payments that settles in real-time, while being cheaper, more secure and more transparent.
Ripple acts as both a cryptocurrency and a digital payment network for financial transactions. It is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network built upon a distributed open-source protocol. It supports tokens representing fiat currency, cryptocurrency, commodities or other units of value such as frequent flier miles or mobile minutes. The token used for the cryptocurrency is pre-mined and utilises the ticker symbol XRP. XRP serves as an intermediate mechanism of exchange between two currencies, or networks, as a temporary settlement layer denomination.
Unlike other blockchain protocols the Ripple Ledger (XRPL) does not employ a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm or a proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithm to validate transactions. Instead, it relies on a more “efficient'' mechanism called the “XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol” to validate transactions in just 3-5 seconds. The XRP Ledger is maintained by independent participants. For each transaction to be successful, there should be an agreement (consensus) among independent validators.