Despite the fact that financial transfers done by financial institutions like banks and payment processors were in existence before the advent of the internet, yet the internet has connected over three billion people online in a short while but the payment infrastructures are still lagging behind in matter of speed of processing payments done especially on an international scale. Ripple, a digital asset exchange platform with its native cryptocurrency XRP is built on an advanced blockchain technology which is scalable aims to bridge the lag and high cost involved in financial transfers done especially globally which usually waste a lot of time and expense to transact.
Ripple which acts a bridge between banks, payment providers and secure, fast and inexpensive international transfer of funds. Ripple enables the real-time global financial transactions. Payment processors like Western Union and Swifts charge hefty fees on currency conversion of funds sent internationally, yet it takes days before the recipient receives the funds but with Ripple, the fee of conversion of a currency to another is at its minimum at the same time making the transfer in real time as it only takes seconds to process a transaction.
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Since its release in 2012, Ripple has been pushing for its currency XRP to be the currency that takes care of the conversion of different currencies. This would lower the transaction fee from one currency to another and back.
Since we would be looking at how to sell or trade Ripple's XRP currency or token for other currencies be it hard cash( that is into USD, EUR etc and withdrawn from the ATM as raw cash) or into other cryptocurrencies because "Ripple" itself is the network or platform that allows the real-time, secure and inexpensive transfer of funds or currencies globally. It is best we understand what Ripple's XRP is and how it works.
XRP is the native token or currency used on the Ripple network which is burned or canceled out whenever a transaction is completed on the network as a means to deter spammers from spamming the network by requiring a certain small fee for a transaction. This small transaction fee is not like the transaction fees collected by banks, Credit cards nor PayPal which they retain rather Ripple transaction fees are destroyed not retained.
To illustrate this better, we would use an example. Suppose there was no fee attached to the sending of transactions on the Ripple network, spammers can send a DDOS to the Ripple network by sending up to a million useless transactions a day just to attack the network, but if a small fee is attached to each transaction made, then the spammer would not be able to keep on sending millions of such useless transactions daily because the fees might be too much to handle.
The current transaction fee for a single transaction on the Ripple network is 0.00001 XRP. This tiny amount of XRP is destroyed forever whenever a single transaction is completed on the Ripple network. With this process, the currency's amount is designed to decrease in the future which will, in turn, raise its value. It is worth noting that with all the transactions that have occurred till date on the Ripple network, not even a single whole XRP has been burnt yet. To illustrate how inexpensive the transaction fee on the Ripple network is, assuming the currency rate of 1 XRP is equivalent to 1 USD then the cost of a single transaction would be 0.00001 XRP, which would be 0.00001 USD which is not even up to a cent.
With 100 billion XRP been all the amount of Ripple's XRP that would ever be created, XRP cannot be mined like Bitcoin because Bitcoin uses proof-of-work as a way in which its coins are mined. Unlike Bitcoin and other coins that are actually the coins been traded, XRP acts as a backup for traditional currencies, that is Yuans or Dollars in another form.
We would take a look at how to sell or trade the XRP for Cash. Let us assume you have created your Ripple wallet and deposited a required initial fund of 20 XRP in your Ripple wallet. You must have deposited the funds in your Ripple wallet in either two ways;
Either by using an exchange platform where you either did a direct bank transfer or paid through your credit card to this exchange platform's bank account with the traditional currencies (USD, EUR etc) equivalent of XRP to be credited on your Ripple wallet. That is, you pay the exchange platform in fiat currency like USD, the dollar amount equivalent of XRP for your account to be credit with. Then you get the fund in your Ripple wallet.
Or you already have another crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum etc and have funds in these wallets, then you converted or changed your Bitcoin into XRP by sending the Bitcoin equivalent to your Ripple wallet usually done still on an exchange platform.
Once the wallet is created and funded and now you want to withdraw or convert the XRP into either fiat currency or other crypto-currencies like Bitcoin. Converting XRP to cash is usually done through exchange platforms like the one you used while funding your Ripple wallet at the initial stage. Examples of such exchanges are Gatehub, Coinbase etc.
When trying to send money from your Ripple wallet to your bank through an exchange platform, the process is a pretty straightforward one as big exchange platforms like Gatehub have options on their website that enables its users to make a direct withdrawal from their wallets to their bank accounts once they are logged in. Once you are signed in to your Gatehub wallet account, you would see a "Send Money" tab. Click on it, once the window opens you would see banks listed for you to send your money to, just select your bank and Gatehub would send you the USD equivalent of your XRP fund depending on the currency value of XRP at the moment.
Another way is done by first converting your XRP into Bitcoin straight from your Ripple wallet and send to an exchange like Coinbase then sell the Bitcoin and withdraw to your bank. It is as simple as that.