XRP Price

XRP is the native asset of the XRP Ledger, a payments-focused blockchain built between 2011 and early 2012 by Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto and David Schwartz. Chris Larsen joined shortly afterwards to found the company now called Ripple.

Two design choices set it apart. The first is that XRP was not mined. All 100 billion units were created at inception, and none have been created since. There is no issuance schedule and no mining reward — a monetary policy that is fixed by construction rather than by rule. In 2017 Ripple placed 55 billion XRP into escrow, releasing a portion each month and returning most of it, which makes the company's holdings visible and predictable on-chain.

The second is consensus. Instead of competing to solve puzzles or staking capital, servers on the network each maintain a list of validators they trust. A new ledger version is agreed roughly every four to six seconds when enough of those trusted validators concur. The documentation is explicit that this avoids "wasteful or competitive use of resources", and altering confirmed history would require collusion above eighty percent of a user's trusted set.

The trade-off is worth stating plainly: security comes from trust in a validator list rather than from expenditure, which is a different security model, not simply a cheaper one.

The ledger is built for settlement. It includes a native decentralised exchange, supports issued assets, and finalises payments in seconds at negligible cost. Ripple's own business — cross-border payments and the RLUSD stablecoin — runs partly on it, though the company can and does settle in other assets, so its commercial growth does not automatically translate into XRP demand.

Anyone can run a server or a validator, and test networks issue trial XRP for development.