What is Ripple
Ripple is the third-largest cryptocurrency in the world by capitalisation (as of 2021), which is based on a distributed ledger.
The project originated in 2011 when three developers (Jed McCaleb, David Schwartz, and Arthur Britto) while mining bitcoin noticed that the process left too much waste and energy consumption was far from satisfactory. Thus, the ready energy costs for mining BTC are equivalent to the volume required to provide Portugal. In addition, according to McCaleb's observations, there was an acute problem with the scalability of the network.
So, the founders of Ripple took care of creating their open-source, decentralised ledger that would bypass all these restrictions and level out the shortcomings. The resulting highly liquid XTZ cryptocurrency can be purchased for exchange and transfer of funds, financing transactions on the Ripple platform, or simply as an investment with the potential to rise in price. Commissions within the system are minimal and uniform. As such, the mining process and its costs are absent in the network.
The project boasts absolute transparency, high scalability, no failures in payments, instant execution of transactions, so-called "chains of trust" throughout the blockchain, as well as a consensus mechanism that is used to confirm transactions.