XRP XRP

The XRP Ledger was built for moving money across borders and currencies, so it is put together differently from mined networks. No new coins are created: the entire supply of one hundred billion units was issued at launch, and the fee on every transaction goes to no one — it is destroyed, so the total slowly shrinks.

Consensus comes from a vote among the validators a node chooses to trust, with neither proof of work nor staked collateral. Settlement takes seconds, which is the whole point of the design: XRP is meant as a bridge asset through which one currency is swapped for another without pre-funding accounts on both sides. An order book and an issuance mechanism are built into the ledger itself, so a tokenised currency lives there without a separate contract.

The company Ripple drives development and holds a large share of the coins: much of it sits in escrow and is released on a published schedule so that sales do not hit the market all at once.

The long-running dispute with the US Securities and Exchange Commission over whether selling XRP amounts to a securities offering was for years the main factor in the coin's availability on American venues.