What is XRP?
XRP is the native token of the XRP Ledger, a public blockchain optimized for fast, cheap value transfer. The ledger was launched in 2012 by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto, and is closely associated with Ripple, a company that builds payment infrastructure for banks and payment providers using XRP as a bridge asset.
XRP transactions settle in three to five seconds and cost a fraction of a cent. The ledger is maintained by a set of independent validators using a consensus protocol that does not rely on mining, which keeps the network's energy footprint close to zero.
How does the XRP Ledger work?
The XRP Ledger uses a federated consensus mechanism: a set of validators agree on the order of transactions through overlapping Unique Node Lists. No validator is privileged and Ripple runs only a minority of the active validators. Forks are resolved by waiting for the supermajority, and the ledger closes every few seconds.
Transaction fees are burned - not paid to validators - which makes XRP mildly deflationary and disincentivises spam. The ledger supports native decentralized exchange functionality, tokenized assets, and as of 2024 a hooks amendment that introduces lightweight smart-contract-like behaviour.