XRP is one of the biggest, most popular cryptocurrencies available. It’s name is well known and established, but also frequently confused with Ripple. In this article we will explain what XRP is, how it relates to Ripple and what it all means. Starting with the names.
The confusion
In crypto you’ll often see XRP and Ripple be used interchangeably, but that’s actually incorrect. XRP is the name of the cryptocurrency, so if you are referring to the digital asset you should use XRP. Ripple is the company that built XRP.
It’s as simple as that.
What is XRP?
XRP is a digital asset specifically geared to payments. It’s designed to be fast, scalable and cheap to send anywhere. This is because it was purpose built to tackle the well known problem of cross-border payments.
Ripple, the company, uses XRP to facilitate efficient cross-border payments for themselves and their partners. Sending fiat overseas is incredibly time consuming and costly because of the number of security checks and bank interactions. By leveraging XRP as a digital asset the exchange of value can occur in just seconds while maintaining a sufficient level of security.
The XRP website claims that transactions can be settled in as quickly as 3-5 seconds. Of course, these transactions don’t require a central intermediary, which is what helps keep the transaction times down.
Price history
A large amount of XRP’s notoriety is the consequence of a meteoric price rise in 2017. In January you could buy 1 XRP for $0.007, less than one cent. At its peak XRP hit $3.84. That’s a 54,757% increase. If you put $1,000 into XRP in January 2017 you’d have bought ~143,000 XRP, which you could have sold for over $500,000 in January 2018. For some XRP was a 500x return.
What is Ripple?
Ripple is a global payments company with many technologically advanced payment solutions. Their goal is to allow financial institutions to send money across the world as efficiently as possible.
Ripple has a number of high caliber companies that leverage their solutions including MoneyGram, American Express, PNC, Santander and Interbank. They reach a network of more than 300 providers across more than 40 countries.
