There's been a lot of hype and talk about XRP recently. From a nearly decade battle with the SEC which it won and now appeals from the SEC are streaming in to keep the cases open XRP has been through the ringer but all of that time it seems like they have constantly been working with companies and banks to build a massive infrastructure.

XRP is one of the old farts on the block. Launched in 2012 it's been around for a crazy long time but it's price has been stifled out from countless endless lawsuits for the SEC and other entities. Now this was called Ripple at the time and honestly I remember getting involved with is WAY back in the day but never really did anything with it. Honestly back then the whole launch was rather confusing and crypto in general was still rather new with limited information for people using it.

For you OG's out there like me you'll understand just how confusing XRP, Ripple and the other names the token had over the years was. I still call XRP ripple to be honest lol

Now it's also important to note that XRP launch of their token did go into the hands of a few which at that times wasn't unheard of being it was one of the very few blockchains at the time.

It's also important to note that XRP is actully very centralized in terms of it's block validations. While there are a little over 100 active validators most are handled by just 35 nodes.

The Original Vision

The original vision of XPR was to be the bridge token between what would be ripple labs. The easy version of this which honestly is common place today is that USD could be swapped for XRP and then another bank say in Germany would swap the XRP into the Germany currency allowing for rather quick and low fee solutions for currency swapping which trust me is very expensive when you're traveling.

The main leg up that XRP has is that it's very focused on working with banks and building an almost like system to the SWIFT markets or more recently BRICS.

The Shift

XRP seems to be shifting more from banks and more towards retail. We have also seen this shift in one of there core wallets called Xaman which allows it to be self custody but also used for a whole host of transactions and payments.

This shift some people dislike while others like and so far it seems to be opening up XRP to a lot more wealth as we continue to see the token price move up based on actions such as this.

Ripple also launched it's own stablecoin which does beg the question why. Why have a stablecoin token on XRP when XRP in itself was suppose to be the acting transaction token. What value does XRP have anymore at that point?

Investing

While there's a lot of hype around XRP at the moment it's important to note a few things on the investor front. The first is to realize that when a pump is happening is normally the worse time to get in but seems to be when most do for some reason. The second is to understand that the market cap of XRP would now have to double in order to hit roughly $7. It becomes harder to have big gains when a large spike has already taken place.

*This article is for entertainment purposes only and is not financial advice. Do your own research before investing and understand the risks.

XRP Future

Another weird thing about XRP is they are now developing a smart contract layer. Which is weird because they originally said they didn't want one because of congestion issues.

Another big thing to note is that XRP already has printed all of it's tokens and a vast majority of the tokens that were given to the team have already been sold in the past. Thus anything happening now is slowly decreasing the amount of XRP in circulation. While the core account has a unlocking of monthly tokens it also has a relocking of them if they are not used by the end of the month.

From what I'm seeing happening is XRP is not so much going down it's original path anymore. It's instead branching out and almost looking like another smart contract blockchain of which we have plenty of already.

What are your thoughts on XRP?