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XRP is a cryptocurrency designed to make the transfer of money between traditional financial institutions cheaper and faster by acting as the underlying bridge which facilitates the transfer of value. XRP Ledger, a cryptographic ledger built by Ripple, the company behind XRP, is powered by a network of nodes and uses XRP as its native cryptocurrency to settle transactions. This is also the primary use case of XRP. The traditional financial institutions with money transfer networks leverage XRP Ledger’s high throughput of 1500 transactions per second to make their supply chain more efficient.

The consensus mechanism used to order and finalize transactions on the XRP Ledger network is different from Proof-of-Work (POW) or Proof-of-Stake (POS) techniques used by most blockchains today. The traditional POW and POS systems rely on an incentive mechanism for the participating validators to act honestly. In contrast, XRP Ledger uses a list of recommended validators called the “Unique Node List” (UNL) that are considered while building consensus.

The UNL validators compare their respective versions of Ledger with one another in a multi-round process. Then, the validators adjust their versions until there is an agreement between 80% of them (a supermajority) about the right order of transactions. Each UNL validator then adjusts their Ledger to match the supermajority, upon which the new state is finalized.

Ripple, a technology company that builds blockchain solutions for traditional financial institutions like banks and exchanges to improve the global money supply chain, created the XRP Ledger, with XRP as its native asset in 2013. At launch, 100 million XRP tokens were created, out of which 80 million tokens were given to the company and the rest to its founders.

Ripple’s initial efforts focused on getting the traditional financial institutions to use XRP Ledger for processing their transactions. Ripple also acquired a BitLicense from the state of New York in 2016 to enhance the credibility of their services and drive deeper adoption of XRP Leder into the global payments system.

Today, a significant use case of XRP is bridging transactions in Ripple’s xRapid product. xRapid is an on-demand liquidity solution used to exchange fiat currencies through the transfer of XRP for circulating value.

The XRP Ledger is managed by a network of validators who constantly compare their records to agree upon one final version. Any independent validator can join the network to participate in the consensus process, where they are free to choose their preferred set of validators for benchmarking. However, Ripple publishes a list of trusted validators (Unique Node List) for the services to consider while building consensus. 

These UNL validators set appropriate benchmarks about the state of the network, which helps with security and makes the differentiation between honest and malicious actors easier.

In Decentralized Finance, online theft and fraud may be conducted by attempting to compromise entire blockchains or by targeting individual wallet holders and tricking them into revealing sensitive information like wallet private keys. The latter is, however, more frequent as the former is quite challenging due to the decentralization of blockchains.

Online/hot wallet holders often fall prey to elaborate online scams and malware attacks that expose their private keys. Therefore, users seeking better security and privacy use devices like Ledger hardware (cold) wallets that store private keys in physical storage devices and take them off the grid so that scammers can never reach them.

Well-known crypto assets like XRP are available online on many centralized exchanges (CEXs). CEXs require KYC information from users before they can use the platform. Furthermore, CEXs limit the true ownership over the crypto assets investors purchase by not providing the private keys to the wallets holding the funds. Therefore, CEXs are not ideal for investors seeking anonymity and control over their online activity. While decentralized exchanges(DEXs) address these issues, they too have loose ends when used with online wallets, exposing them to scams and theft.

For optimal security, investors should buy XRP using Ledger hardware wallets, where their investments can rest safely and out of reach of scammers and malicious malware. Moreover, Ledger Live is a dynamic tool that can be used to track the real-time performance of one’s investments and make diligent investment decisions.

Using Ledger services is pretty simple and convenient, users can even use their Credit/Debit cards or PayPal to directly buy XRP, following these steps:

• Get a Ledger hardware wallet.
• Download and install Ledger web or mobile application.
• Connect the Ledger app with the Ledger hardware wallet.
• Install the XRP app from the app catalog.
• Start buying XRP using Ledger Live.

Users also can swap or trade XRP on Ledger Live for other cryptocurrencies for a dynamic and diversified portfolio that maximizes returns. The hundred of swap pairs available on Ledger can be accessed as follows:

• Get a Ledger Hardware Wallet.
• Download Ledger Live.
• Install the ‘Exchange’ application on Ledger Live, along with the applications for the coins you wish to swap.
• One must have XRP in the linked hardware wallet to facilitate the swap. 
• Once there are sufficient assets in the wallet, swapping is possible.