XRP

XRP is the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), an open-source blockchain originally developed by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto — the same team that founded Ripple Labs. Unlike Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies, XRP was not designed to replace fiat currencies but to serve as a bridge currency for international payments, enabling financial institutions to settle cross-border transactions in seconds rather than days. The XRPL predates Ethereum and is one of the earliest live blockchain networks still in continuous operation.

The XRP Ledger closes a new version approximately every 3-5 seconds with fees that are fractions of a cent — typically around 0.00001 XRP, or a small fraction of a US cent at current prices. All 100 billion XRP tokens were pre-mined at genesis in 2012, meaning there is no mining process and no new supply issuance; the total supply is fixed and slowly decreases as small amounts of XRP are burned to pay transaction fees. Roughly half of the initial supply was granted to Ripple Labs and its founders, with a portion later placed into escrow contracts that release up to one billion XRP per month to Ripple, subject to unused amounts being returned to escrow — a mechanism designed to reduce concerns about coordinated dumping.

XRP and Ripple Labs faced a landmark lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) beginning in December 2020, in which the SEC alleged that XRP sales constituted unregistered securities offerings. In July 2023, Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York ruled that XRP itself is not inherently a security, and that programmatic sales on public exchanges did not violate the Securities Act — although institutional sales to sophisticated buyers did. This landmark decision provided significant regulatory clarity for the broader crypto industry and became one of the most-cited rulings in subsequent SEC crypto litigation. The final settlement in 2024 was substantially smaller than the SEC had originally sought.

Since the ruling, Ripple has expanded XRPL's capability set materially. The XRPL now supports native fungible tokens (issued assets), a built-in decentralised exchange (DEX) with order books directly in the ledger, AMM pools, NFTs via XLS-20, hooks (limited on-chain automation), and — via the sidechain roadmap — full EVM compatibility through the XRPL EVM Sidechain launched with Peersyst. Ripple has also expanded its enterprise product line (RippleNet, Ripple Payments, Ripple Custody) and, in 2024, launched RLUSD, a US-dollar stablecoin issued on both the XRPL and Ethereum.