Ripple (XRP) is a digital asset that runs on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), a public blockchain built for fast, low-cost cross-border payments. The XRP Ledger launched in 2012, created by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto, who co-founded the company now known as Ripple alongside Chris Larsen that same year. XRP acts as a bridge currency, letting value move between different fiat currencies and payment networks without a common intermediary.
Unlike Bitcoin, the XRP Ledger doesn't use mining; independent validator servers confirm transactions through a federated consensus protocol, letting XRPL settle transactions in 3 to 5 seconds. XRP has a fixed maximum supply of 100 billion tokens, all created at launch; no new XRP can be mined or issued, and a small fee is destroyed with every transfer, making total supply slowly deflationary.
As of late June 2026, approximately 62 billion XRP were in circulation, with a market cap of roughly $67.5 billion, ranking #6 among cryptocurrencies, per CoinGecko. Ripple uses XRP in RippleNet, its cross-border payments network for banks and financial institutions, to source liquidity and reduce reliance on pre-funded accounts.