You can hold your Bitcoin in Ripple. We want to be agnostic to any currency, whether that be a virtual currency, political currencies, or peer-to-peer currencies.
— Chris Larsen
The Ripple network is a protocol. It's like HTTP for money. Users, merchants, anyone can use it for free without a license.
Bitcoin solved the double-spend problem. The key problem was payment confirmation without central clearing. Bitcoin's solution was ingenious but wasteful - it's fairly slow, and you can't put other things on it.
Banking now is like sending a letter: you send it, you don't know if it reached there. Ripple is more like sending an iMessage: you send it, and you immediately know.
Low-value payments are now possible. Now, Ripple can make it easy for Facebook and Uber and Amazon to make payments to developers in real time. It's online and completely global.
We believe that Ripple will change the way the world thinks about and uses currency through universal access to a trusted, transparent, and easy-to-understand multi-currency financial tool.
2016 has proven to be the year where the most forward-thinking financial institutions are actually using blockchain technologies for payments and settlement rather than as an experiment.
Countless banks around the world are already testing distributed ledger systems in proof-of-concept trials.
We don't think the blockchain can do most of what's been ascribed to it. But we're entering the Internet of value - and that is very much underhyped.
A lot of financial technology is foolhardy. Saying, 'We're going to kill banks. We're going to disrupt everything,' ignores some realities.
We saw for a time that digital currencies were radioactive to banks, but that's not the case anymore.
Ripple is redefining the way that value moves around the world, and today we're already enabling real-time, affordable international settlement between banks who have adopted our solutions.
Banks can send big corporate payments through existing channels or send a small payment through Ripple. They don't have to rip out existing infrastructure; they can use Ripple to make the transactions more profitable or more efficient.
A distributed ledger is basically a shared database that allows institutions to directly send and receive money in a trustworthy fashion without a middleman. As a result, we have the capacity to connect the world's payment systems for the first time.That's a big deal.
