Ripple coin

Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network that is open to financial institutions worldwide and was created by Ripple Labs Inc., a US-based technology company. Released in 2012, Ripple is built upon a distributed open source protocol, and supports tokens representing fiat currency, cryptocurrency, commodities, or other units of value such as frequent flier miles or mobile minutes.[2] Ripple purports to enable "secure, instantly and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks". The ledger employs the native cryptocurrency known as XRP.
In December 2020, Ripple Labs and two of its executives were sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for selling XRP tokens, which the SEC classified as unregistered securities.[3] In July 2023, the court ruled that "XRP, as a digital token, is not in and of itself a 'contract, transaction, or scheme' that embodies the Howey requirements of an investment contract."[4]
Ripple was conceived by Jed McCaleb and built by Arthur Britto and David Schwartz who then approached Ryan Fugger who had debuted[clarification needed] in 2005 as a financial service to provide secure payment options to members of an online community via a global network.[5][6] Fugger had developed a system called OpenCoin which would transform into Ripple.[7][8] The company also created its own form of digital currency referred to as XRP to allow financial institutions to transfer money with negligible fees and wait-time.[9] In 2013, the company reported interest from banks for using its payment system.[10]
By 2018, over 100 banks had signed up, but most of them were only using Ripple's XCurrent messaging technology, while avoiding the XRP cryptocurrency due to its volatility problems.[11] Representatives of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), whose market dominance is being challenged by Ripple, have argued that the scalability issues of Ripple and other blockchain solutions remain unsolved, confining them to bilateral and intra-bank applications.[11] A Ripple executive acknowledged in 2018 that "We started out with your classic blockchain, which we love. But the feedback from the banks is you can’t put the whole world on a blockchain."[12]
Ripple relies on a common shared ledger, which is a distributed database storing information about all Ripple accounts. Chris Larsen told the Stanford Graduate School of Business that the network was managed by a network of independent servers which compare their transaction records, and that servers could in theory belong to anyone, including banks or market makers.[7] Ripple validates accounts and balances instantly for payment transmission and delivers payment notification within a few seconds.[13] Payments are irreversible, and there are no chargebacks.[14]
Ripple Labs continued as the primary contributors of code to the consensus verification system behind Ripple.[15] In 2014, the protocol gained access to the US banking system amid concerns over security and a lack of regulation