The Ripple Origin Story

Ripple was conceived in 2011 when three developers, David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto, sought to develop a more efficient and sustainable system than bitcoin for sending value.

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The Ripple Origin Story

Ripple was conceived in 2011 when three developers, David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto, sought to develop a more efficient and sustainable system than bitcoin for sending value. In 2012, they formed a company, NewCoin, and launched their cross-border blockchain platform XRP Ledger. (The company was later rebranded as Ripple Labs.)

Ripple approached their vision differently than other cryptocurrencies by designing a system to work alongside existing financial infrastructure, not replace it. The team believed this approach would revolutionize the global financial system.

Ripple’s native token, XRP, is central to this system. XRP acts as a bridge currency to facilitate quick, cost-effective cross-border transactions, enhancing liquidity and reducing costs for financial institutions. Ripple focused on building partnerships with financial institutions to transform cross-border payments, including Santander, Bank of America, and Standard Chartered.

In December 2020, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple, alleging that XRP was an unregistered security. This action led to XRP being delisted from several major U.S. exchanges, significantly impacting its market price. Separately, XRP investors filed a class action suit against Ripple, claiming that CEO Brad Garlinghouse made misleading statements in 2017.

In July 2023, Ripple secured a partial victory when a New York judge ruled that:

This ruling was seen as a significant win for Ripple and the broader crypto industry. In August 2024, Ripple was ordered to pay $125 million to the SEC, substantially less than the $2 billion the SEC had initially sought. And in June 2024, a California judge dismissed most of the class action lawsuit against Ripple.

Bottom line: Much of the legal baggage hanging over Ripple has been cleared, though the SEC is likely to appeal the New York ruling, and the conflicting opinions from different judges have created uncertainty about XRP’s status as a security.

XRP remains one of the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and has maintained a significant presence in the crypto market despite these regulatory challenges.

Key Fundamental Data

Daily Active Users (DAU): XRP’s DAU has been relatively stagnant over the last year with no significant changes. As of writing, it records an average of 30k DAU according to The Block, lagging behind its competitor Stellar, which has averaged 100k DAU over the past year.

Fees and Revenues:

“ODL sales” refers to XRP that Ripple sells to financial institutions for its ODL service, to facilitate cross-border payments. “Total purchases” is the XRP that Ripple bought back from the open market, to manage the XRP supply.

Market Cap:  As of this writing, the market cap of XRP is approximately $35 billion. The market cap has shown fluctuations over the past year but has not significantly increased during this period. Notably, Ripple’s XRP has a much larger market cap compared to its direct competitor, Stellar's XLM, which has around $3 billion invested in the coin.

XRP’s historical market cap trend.

Market Analysis

Problem that it solves: Ripple launched to address significant problems in the global financial system, particularly focusing on inefficiencies in cross-border payments. The project now offers more products beyond cross-border payments, including infrastructure for governments to issue and manage their Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

Customers:  Ripple primarily serves a wide range of financial institutions, including banks, payment providers, and other financial services companies. Individual users also constitute a significant portion of Ripple’s customer base, which, according to general crypto market trends, are predominantly male and largely college-educated.

Value creation: Adopting Ripple allows these financial institutions to reap the benefits of a blockchain solution, including fast and cheap transactions. For large institutions and banks, XRP enables fast and low-cost cross-border transactions compared to traditional remittance payments, which are slow and expensive.

Market structure: In terms of blockchain projects, the global remittance space is still emerging, though Ripple, which has been around the longest, is the clear leader.

Market size: The market potential size is massive, as there is potential for Ripple to partner with more banks and institutions with the goal of replacing the SWIFT international payments system. Ripple estimates $150 trillion of cross-border payment flows per year.

Regulatory risks: Ripple has already had encounters with the SEC, plus there’s a high risk of regulation as the project integrates with traditional financial institutions.

Our analysts rated XRP a 3.5 out of 5 for market analysis. Download the complete scorecard here.

Competitive Advantage

Technology/blockchain platform: XRP runs on its own XRP Ledger, launched over a decade ago in 20