Ripple aka "XRP" is a digital asset that was built for payments. It is the native digital asset on the XRP Ledger—an open-source, permissionless and decentralized blockchain technology that can settle transactions in 5 seconds. XRP could be sent directly without needing a central intermediary, making it a convenient instrument in bridging two different currencies quickly and efficiently.
Being released in the year of 2012, Ripple is built upon a distributed open source protocol and supports tokens representing fiat currency, commodities, crypto or other units of value such as frequent flier miles or mobile minutes.
Ripple purports to enable secure, instantly and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with zero charge backs. The ledger employs the native cryptocurrency known as XRP.
The original authors of Ripple are known as; Arthur Britto, David Schwartz and Ryan Fugger which also engaged in the developing of Ripple Labs Inc. It's Initial release was in 2012 and it's stable release was in 15th of may, 2018.
Is XRP A Good Crypto Investment?
Ripple "XRP" is a good coin for general cryptocurrency enthusiasts as it is an altcoin but it is still respected and has its ground as a top five coin with an established market.
Also, XRP is a good investment for Thematic investors in the financial sector, seeing as XRP is a coin aimed at mainstream financial institutions. This means that people looking to invest in the future of transactions and payment would have a good shot of looking at XRP.
The Journey Of XRP
Ripple’s trajectory through 2021 and beyond is looking quite good based on the fact that it had a really tough year in 2020 and the years before that.
The coin suffered through 2019 and was one of the worse performing top crypto assets but this means there is a lot of room for it to go up the charts. To understand the path to how XRP will perform in 2022, and how 2020 shaped it, it is pertinent to go back a few more years and examine the waves of XRP through its history.
"XRP" was created by Ripple in 2012 with a premined supply of 100 billion tokens. This figure is a lot larger than the supply of Bitcoin which is 21 million coins. In addition, more XRP coins can be created whereas no more Bitcoin will ever be made.
XRP was trading close to $0.005 on its launch and prices remained largely flat until 2017, when the entire crypto industry went through a unique boom. Most people know about Bitcoin’s peak in December 2017, but in April and May 2017, XRP sky rocketed to $0.40 per token, with prices settling down around the $0.20 range for the next six months.
With the follow of Bitcoin’s boom in charts, altcoin season set in and XRP prices rose with a mind boggling 84 per cent in a day from $0.27 to $0.51 mid way through December 2017. The next two weeks XRP went to cross the $1 mark and finished the year on an incredible high of $2.30, an increase of 38,000 percent, compared with where it was at the beginning of 2017.
Surely, what goes up must come down and XRP fell below the $1 mark when February 2018 came around. XRP continued to struggle all throughout 2019 and even while other top crypto assets picked up the pace in 2020, XRP still wasn't able to catchup.
XRP, as a cryptocurrency, has very low barriers of entry to start investing and trading in. Someone new to the line up can quite easily get their hands on XRP and begin their investment journey with the coin by just holding onto it and waiting for Appreciation or Depreciation. However, there are a number of different ways that a person can actually invest in Ripple and start to make money off of it. It all begins with buying and holding.
This is one of the more common and popular methods employed with investing in cryptocurrency and has especially paid off with regards to Bitcoin and it's counterparts. Buying and holding is a simple and very effective method to profit from crypto, but it may not be the best use of XRP.
As it as been explained in the earlier reads, XRP is a volatile asset and it has been fluctuating in price for some time now. Its movement has not been steadily on the hill side like other coins as its price is affected by a few different factors as it is owned by a full company in Ripple. Another very popular method of investment in crypto is usually through mining but it must be mentioned that you cannot mine XRP and this again goes back to the supply being owned and controlled by a single company. The best way to invest and profit from Ripple is probably trading.
