- San Francisco-based money transfer firm Ripple, which uses a cryptocurrency to tokenise its operations, has seen its XRP currency gain about 80% over the past 24 hours, making it the third-largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalisation.
- Only Bitcoin and Ethereum have larger market caps, according to the researcher Coinmarketcap.com.
There’s about 100 billion XRP in existence, most of them still owned by the company with 61%, and that’s worth $80 billion at today’s price. That means Ripple today is worth more than Uber.
Founded in 2012 by what was then known as Ripple Labs, Ripple uses its XRP cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to speed up cross-border money transfers and bank settlements. Currently, most of the bank-to-bank transfers are facilitated on Swift, a much older network that can often take days to send money internationally, with high fees. Ripple’s proprietary protocol converts all funds it receives into XRP, and then seeks the cheapest form in which to make the transfer.
Ripple’s transfers are extremely fast taking only about 4 seconds. The company announced on December 14 that banks in Japan and South Korea will begin tests of Ripple’s blockchain technology. Ripple said in a blog post that the Japan Bank Consortium (JBC) – a group of 61 Japanese banks that are members of Ripple’s enterprise blockchain network, RippleNet – had announced the launch of the pilot, which also involves two of South Korea’s largest banks, Woori Bank and Shinhan Bank.
Ripple recently placed 55 billion XRP in a cryptographically-secured escrow account to create certainty of XRP supply at any given time, allowing investors to calculate the maximum supply of tokens that can enter the market. This lockup assures investors and banks who use the Ripple transfer system that there is an adequate supply for the growing volume of transactions.
