What is Ripple? The cryptocurrency that is enriching investors in miraculous fashion

Ripple has been generating magnificent returns for investors. The trend is being chased across the world and even in India, this cryptocurrency has become a favourite. It is promising a lot and its valuation is low at the moment, thereby enticing new investors who wish to catch the wave in its initial stage and make miracle profits. or at least attempt to do so. Be that as it may, here we are looking to answer this question: what is Ripple?
 
Ripple was co-founded by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb. The coin is labelled as a XRP.

This digital currency acts as a bridge to other currencies. One key point of Ripple is that the coin does not discriminate between one fiat/cryptocurrency and another, therefore, makes it easy for any currency to be exchanged for another.

Ripple adopts a medium known as Gateway which serves as the intermediary in the trust chain between two parties who are desiring to make a transaction.

This Gateway performs as the credit intermediary that receives and sends currencies to public addresses over the Ripple network.

Trading in Ripple is little complex, as anyone or any business can register and open a gateway which authorizes the registrant to act as the middleman for exchanging currencies, maintaining liquidity and transferring payments on the network.

However, Ripple network does not operates on a proof-of-work system like Bitcoin or proof-of-stake system like Nxt which is another blockchain. Instead, the transaction made in Ripple relies on a consensus in order to validate account balances and transactions on the system.

Investopedia mentions that the consensus works to improve the integrity of the system by preventing double spending.

Momentum in Ripple has been led by amazingly promising partnerships that the coin has attained. 

In the beginning of 2018, Ripple partnered with Moneygram, IndusInd Bank, IDT & Mercury FX, SBI Holdings, LianLian International and other projects. 

Apart from this, Ripple has gone through a successful series of tests in over 60 banking and financial institutions in Japan and South Korea. So, it is expected that XRP will be implemented into more than several banking systems in order to support global cross payments in near real time, as per GlobalCoin report. 

Also, Ripple is working on improving its technical capabilities where they will be adding extra features to enable even stronger security while also working on implementing its system in financial institutions in China, Brazil, and India.’

Apart from this, Ripple has also build a payment application which takes care of transactions instantly, by partnering with a consortium of 61 Japanese bank. 

Will Ripple be a blockbuster currency? 

Earlier Stephen Powaga, head of research at investment firm Blockchain Momentum in CNN money, said, "Ripple and some other cryptocurrencies have relatively low transaction fees, which made them popular when people began looking for alternatives to Bitcoin."

Data given by Santa Clara University, it was highlighted that, the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin networks currently process 7, 20, and 56 transactions per second, respectively, and the Ripple protocol is able to process 1,500 transactions per second. 

It said, “ If technological improvements bring forth safer and faster ways to implement a blockchain-based currency exchange, then Ripple’s XRP platform will become obsolete unless its network of contributors works to provide timely updates.”

Craig Cole from Cryptomaps in a NEWBTC report said, "Ripple just might be the catalyst in making cryptocurrency more mainstream. The virtual currency is certainly on the rise and has the potential to be the first token to truly disrupt an industry, and if it does, expect XRP to reach Bitcoin-like levels of ubiquity in the near future.”

John-Paul McCaffrey, Associate Director at Long Island University added in the report saying, "Ripple certainly has the potential to move up a notch in 2018, but I think it will be more likely in 2019. As the market observes more projects being coded in other algorithms such as XRP, ETH will likely take a backseat to the next big coin/token. It will take some time for the markets to digest this, so I am projecting 2019 to be the likely time for it to take place.”

While,  a number of experts have told Forbes that Ripple may well make cryptocurrency more conventional.