By most measurable standards, 2017 was the year of cryptocurrency, with total market capitalization growing by over 1,600% – and many believe this is just the beginning.
Ripple, which is traded as XRP, has the third highest market capitalization of any cryptocurrency. Currently, the Ripple coins in circulation amount to over $ 39 billion.
Cryptocurrency mining
Most cryptocurrencies are created in two ways: Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Jump-start the offer or currency is launched. Cryptocurrency mining uses computer processing power and specialized mining software to decrypt encrypted hashes.
You can think of hashes as pieces of the puzzle. These hashes are part of a block that checks transactions for a specific cryptocurrency. As soon as enough hashes have been decrypted, the block is recorded in the blockchain and the miner receives a reward in the form of cryptocurrency. For most coins, the difficulty increases as more coins are put into circulation, which requires more processing power for each new coin that is mined.
For some newer coins and some coins that use decryption algorithms designed to maintain a balanced playing field for miners like Monero, a standard dual-core or quad-core processor can be used to mine the cryptocurrency, though mining as part of a pool is usually more effective than solo mining, and mining on lower specification hardware is likely to burn more electricity costs than it brings in producing cryptocurrency.
Other coins, like Ethereum, are generally mined using graphics processor cards (or banks of GPUs) unlike Computer Processing Units (CPUs) – the territory of specialized hardware known as ASICs. The advanced hardware requirements required to mine Bitcoin have centralized mining efforts, making China the largest Bitcoin producer in the world – at least for now.
XRP is the coin, Ripple is the blockchain technology
What is Ripple?
Ripple was designed as a currency for a centralized payment systemwhich is both its appeal and a common reason why some in the cryptocurrency community do not believe that Ripple is an equivalent to other cryptocurrencies, particularly because of its centralization and corporate control. Ripple is focuses on fast and inexpensive bank-to-bank transactions, while corporate and peer-to-peer transfers are also offered.
ONE The ripple transfer can be done in secondscompared to minutes for an Ethereum transfer, hours for a Bitcoin transfer, and often three to five days for a traditional bank transfer of standard currencies. An average Ripple transfer costs less than half a cent, is among the lowest of all cryptocurrencies, and is potentially a thousand times less than the cost of a traditional bank transfer.
Why XRP cannot be degraded
A handful of cryptocurrencies cannot be mined in the traditional sense. Ripple belongs to this group. At the beginning, 100 billion Ripple coins brought the currency to the market. Ripple Labs, formerly OpenCoin, still holds around 60% of the currency in Ledger escrow books.
Ripple management can release up to a billion coins per month, but the expected release rate is well below the one billion coin cap, with the unused balance being transferred to a new escrow account that is not released until the first month in which no escrow is available is intended for release. That sounds complicated, but it just means that The supply of Ripple is unlikely to suddenly open up, flood the market, and prices crash. Instead, an orderly increase in supply is expected.
Ripple’s role in the cryptocurrency hierarchy
Every cryptocurrency has a reason to exist. In some cases the currency exists as an alternative to established fiat currencies, with decentralization and a value determined by an active market being the main attractions. Privacy is a goal of some currencies like Monero, Zcash, and Dash. Instead, Ripple focuses on providing a quick and inexpensive way to transfer money. In January, Ripple announced in a tweet that three of the five largest money transfer companies worldwide would use XRP in cash flows in 2018, with more expected in the pipeline.
Much of the excitement about Ripple is centered around the news, which Over 100 banks and companies have registered to use the company xCurrently System to transfer money. However, the xCurrent system does not use ripple tokens (XRP). Ripple tokens are used with the company’s xRapid transfer system, a system with a young user base.
Ripple market value and market capitalization
The value of the Ripple currency soared from 0.006 (a fraction of a penny per coin), near its trading range since 2013, to an all-time high of over 0.00 per coin on January 4, 2018. Ripple is trading at 0.69 and has a market cap of 0.27 billion. Before its massive ramp-up in late 2017, XRP was the coin crypto traders liked to poke fun at, as its price barely moved compared to other coin denominations.
Offer statistics
Ripple’s offer is around 38 billion coins if you only look at the number of tokens in current circulation. In total, the offer is 100 billion coins, with the Ripple company being able to release up to 1 billion additional coins per month as needed. In the past, most of these reserve coins were held in an escrow account, with the unused coins going to a new escrow account that will be released at a later date.
Other ways to profit
Ripple’s massive price hike has attracted and is bringing on both investors and speculators a new volatility for XRP with opportunities for both short term trades and long term investments. Ripple isn’t available on the Coinbase exchange or the GDAX trading platform, but a number of other exchanges offer trading opportunities for XRP, including Binance and other well-known exchanges.
Gatehub also serves as the “official” online wallet for XRP, offering both a wallet service through which you can send and receive money, and Gatehub’s trading function, which allows users to trade popular coins such as Bitcoin and Ethereum and trade against fiat currencies. The Gatehub wallet can be topped up with US dollars, which can then be used to buy Ripple or other digital currencies.
Alternative coins
Ripple cannot be mined, and Bitcoin has become an industrially mined currency, making the hardware and power requirements inaccessible to most people. Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, and Dash remain popular with altcoin miners. Mining success rates and profitability depend on a number of factors, including hardware and the availability of pools that coordinate the mining effort. Many miners focus on higher capitalization altcoins in the hopes that those currencies will have more staying power. Cryptocurrencies, especially newer currencies, can be forgotten.
Final thoughts
Ripple occupies a unique place in the cryptocurrency market, promising acceptance in mainstream financial transactions for banks, corporations, and even individuals, although the focus is on larger institutions. The long-term value of the currency itself, XRP, will largely depend on the acceptance that Ripple is gaining as an alternative or even preferred method for transferring money around the world.
While Ripple cannot be broken down, There are many trading opportunities either for short-term trades that take advantage of the newfound volatility of XRP, or for long-term trades for the true believers who want to build a position in a currency with limited issuance that could become the backbone of many financial transactions in the future.
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