Good evening Steemians
In this series of articles I want to put a spotlight on a specific cryptocurrency and write about the details in all these aspects:
Aim of the currency
Technical details
Market position
Forecast
The cryptocurrency in focus will be chosen at random, although I am for sure following all recent news in the cryptocurrency world and am taking always one of the most interesting ones.
To begin we will put the spotlight on RIPPLE or XRP
Aim of the Currency
What is this currency about? What does it do differently than the rest ?
Where is the unique selling point and at what audience is this coin targeted.
All that questions and more will be answered in the following paragraph.
The first predecessor of Ripple started in the year 2004, invented by Ryan Fugger, and called Ripplepay back then. Ripple and the company behind have since then focused on the banking sector as a target audience, both on the marketing and the software development part. Therefore it is not really a surprise to see a lot of features that are clearly targeting at a banking audience.
The Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP) enables the direct and instant money transfer between two parties and it does not matter in which currency that this transfer is happening (as long as these two currencies have an exchange rate). In the background for sure, all of this transactions are relying on a blockchain as a distributed ledger where all these transactions will be stored in a unchangeable and consistent way.
But Ripple even goes beyond that, they want to improve the interbanking sector of payment transactions, making those transactions fast and very reliable and therefore speeding up the global velocity in which financial transactions can be made.
Additionally to being able to have__ money transfers in all kinds of currencies__ Ripple itself features its own currency called XRP. This currency is for instance used as a bridge currency if a Fiat currency pair has no valid exchange rate.
Many financial institutions have adopted this idea and are experimenting with Ripple for global payments. A list of these institutions can be found here
Technical Details
All these transactions are based on the blockchain of Ripple, they themselves call it one of the most advanced ones, scalable and secure. Which is for sure absolutely necessary if they want to be an option for working the intrabank payments. Apart from that Ripple features some quite uncommon designs I want to also at least mention.
Gateways, a gateway is an institution where money can be put into or withdrawn from. They feature the distributed ledger aka blockchain in order to put those values received or withdrawn into. Those institutions can be seen a bit like banks for the Ripple blockchain.
Consensus ledger, Ripple features a quite unique way of consensus mechanism, its kind of a distributed Proof of correctness. So in very short words, all nodes need to reach consensus about the state and the transactions to execute, if this fails they will start over again with a reduced disagreement until the consensus is finally reached.
Bitcoin bridge, not only is there the possibility to do transactions with a lot of fiat currencies but also to send funds to a bitcoin account without need to hold any digital currency.
I don't want to go further into the technical details, but it is quite obvious that Ripple does some things different to Bitcoin for instance. Further information can be found here.
Market Position
Currently, Ripple is placed 3rd in Cryptocurrency World if we sort this by Market Capitalization. (Data took from Coinmarketcap.com at 10/16/17 on 22:06 CET). It had quite a tough fight for the 3rd position with Bitcoin Cash, both of them were having a Market Cap of over 7 Billion Dollars in September. But Ripple won this fight during the last weeks and is now leading by 5 Billion Dollars, having 10 Billion while Bitcoin Cash has reduced to only have 5.
After having quite a good time following a clever marketing strategy in end of August things settled down a bit in September. But now with the big Ripple conference right around the corner things have heated up and Ripple made good progress in price again. This can be seen clearly in the 3 month chart.
If we are looking back even further than that we see the general rise in April-June (happened all over the crypto market) where one Ripple was worth 0.41 Dollars at its peak.
Forecast
The marketing strategy that I talked about in the paragraph before was a countdown and traders believed that something huge was happening at the end of it. In the end, they announced a big get together of the who is who in the banking industry like Ben Bernanke and Tim Berners-Lee. This was seen as a bit of a setback and therefore sells started again after this rather big gains.
In the end, I am quite sure that the strategy of focusing on the banking sector and building a strong network there is paying off sooner or later. As we can see on this event clearly people are having high hopes that Ripple gets a big breakthrough with major banks. And honestly, i think it is only a matter of time before this happens.
Even this convention, called "swell by Ripple", which has been starting on 10/16/2017 and lasts to the 18th of October could maybe turn the tides, I expect some major movements in price if they are revealing some breakthrough news there.
Let's see what the following days will bring, exciting times ahead for sure !
Conclusion
Ripple has a lot of potential, but also some drawbacks that I did not mention earlier. I think the potential is clear and the ways that they can leverage on this are manifold. I personally think that this coin will see a nice development in price in 2017 and the coming years.
Last but not least there are also some drawbacks and they should not be unmentioned:
Completely pre-mined coin with a high 20% retained by founders.
Crypto enthusiasts don't like Ripple because they deem it centralized.
The close collaboration with banks is also seen as going the wrong way by some.
