XRP wallet

What is XRP?

XRP is a cryptocurrency that acts as the underlying bridge that facilitates the transfer of value, making money transfers between traditional financial institutions cheaper and faster. 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 Proof-of-Work (POW) or Proof-of-Stake (POS) methods employed by the majority of current blockchains are different from the consensus mechanism utilized on the XRP Ledger network to arrange and complete transactions. 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 Labs wants to use the XRP technology to speed up banking transactions all across the world. Ripple is nearly the exact opposite in every way of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are founded on the idea of isolating financial transactions from the financial institutions of traditional currencies.