After the surprising rise and consequent financial excitement of Bitcoin, plenty of people are open to investing in the next big thing to emerge from the world of cryptocurrency, and it’s possible that Ripple could be the perfect candidate for the role. Ripple actually plays two roles, both as an open payment network and a cryptocurrency (trading as XRP). XRP is currently one of the biggest cryptocurrencies on the market (by market cap).
However, as every investment made is considered a risk, it pays to learn as much as you can before going ahead, so the final decision is to be as informed as you can be. Below we share five major points about Ripple which are very worth knowing before an investment is made.
Ripple was created by experts
OpenCoin is the company behind Ripple, and OpenCoin was founded by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb who both have impressive experience in this field – Larsen being the powerhouse behind an existing major company dealing with finances, and McCaleb with a background in bitcoin trading. They have been very successful in attracting hefty investments from various funding sources.
Ripple is underpinned by a serious mission
The ultimate goal of Ripple is for it to become a viable and trustworthy alternative to current traditional payment methods, such as credit cards and PayPal. Crucially, this service involves very, very low fees – for example charging a total of just 1000th of a cent for a single transaction compared to the PayPal fee of around 3% plus a 30c fee on top.
Traditional lenders are keen to support Ripple
Apple and Google were early supporters of Ripple, along with a couple of large banks, and many more global banks are keen to get on board. This bodes well for the future success of Ripple, which is of course pretty irresistible considering the tiny fee makes trading in XRP an easy way to make a lot more profit on their own lending deals with customers.
Ripple could revolutionize the financial world
The Ripple currency is decentralized, offering bank to bank transactions with no costly middle fee stage to cover. Ripple can also work with a bank’s existing systems, there is no need for them to update in order to cope – as they must do with other cryptocurrencies. As if all that wasn’t enough, Ripple is also extremely fast when processing transactions – around 4 seconds a time. This is faster than their competitors, and a blink of an eye compared to the 3-5 days traditional bank transactions take.
Ripple is safer than other cryptocurrencies
Largely because Ripple doesn’t use miners to confirm transactions, the risk of security breaches and hacking attacks is much lower.
There’s still a long way to go for cryptocurrencies like Ripple to become established as serious contenders in the financial markets, but for those looking to invest regardless, it certainly seems to be a good bet for the long term.
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