A payment-focused digital asset designed for fast, low-cost cross-border settlement, with a unique consensus model and a US regulatory history.
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XRP is the native digital asset of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), a payment-focused blockchain originally launched in 2012 by Ripple Labs. The XRPL was designed specifically for cross-border value transfer, with target use cases including remittances, settlement between financial institutions, and any context where dollar settlement is too slow or expensive. The total supply of 100 billion XRP was created at genesis; no new XRP is ever issued, and a small amount is destroyed (burned) with every transaction as anti-spam.
XRP gained significant attention during 2017-2018 when Ripple Labs partnered with banks to use XRP-based payment rails. It was also the subject of a high-profile SEC lawsuit filed in December 2020 alleging XRP was an unregistered security. A 2023 court ruling found that programmatic sales of XRP on exchanges did not constitute securities offerings, which materially reduced regulatory uncertainty for the asset.
The XRP Ledger uses a unique consensus protocol where validators agree on transaction order through a multi-round voting process rather than the proof-of-work or proof-of-stake models common elsewhere. Validators are not paid; they are run by a diverse set of operators (financial institutions, exchanges, individuals) who use the ledger and want it to function correctly. Transaction finality is ~3-5 seconds, fees are typically less than a cent, and throughput is around 1,500 TPS sustained.
XRPL has native support for issued tokens (assets denominated as IOUs from a trusted issuer), a built-in decentralized exchange, and recently added smart contract capabilities through hooks and the XLS-30 native AMM. The ledger is more feature-rich at the protocol level than most alternatives, with much of that functionality predating the broader DeFi era.
Cross-border payments and remittances are the core use case. Ripple's enterprise products (RippleNet, On-Demand Liquidity) use XRP as a bridging asset between fiat currencies, letting financial institutions move value without pre-funding nostro accounts in destination markets. The XRPL's native DEX and stablecoin support are also used for FX-style trading. Some financial institutions use XRPL for settlement of tokenized assets, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.
Critics of XRP highlight the centralization concerns: Ripple Labs holds a large portion of the original 100B XRP supply (locked in escrow with monthly releases), validator distribution is more concentrated than in Bitcoin or Ethereum, and the protocol's evolution has historically been led by Ripple rather than a fully open community. Supporters point to the legal clarity from the 2023 court ruling, real institutional adoption, and the ledger's strong technical performance for its design goals.
For broader payment-focused crypto context, see the Lightning Network entry (Bitcoin's Layer 2) and the stablecoin entry.