XRP: The Payments Ledger Built for Fast Cross-Border Transfers
A 2012 payments ledger, Ripple, and a long US lawsuit
XRP is the native coin of the XRP Ledger, a blockchain launched in 2012 to make cross-border payments fast and cheap, and closely tied to the company Ripple.
1. What it is and who is behind it
The XRP Ledger was designed by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto and went live in 2012. A company founded that year by Chris Larsen and McCaleb — first OpenCoin, now Ripple — has driven its growth; the ledger itself runs on open-source software. XRP pays fees and covers the small reserve needed to open an account.
All 100 billion XRP were created at launch; no more can be issued. Eighty billion went to the company, and in late 2017 Ripple locked 55 billion in on-ledger escrow that releases a capped amount each month. On the Crypto Nation map, XRP is the city-hall tower of XRP City, as the ledger’s own coin.
2. Consensus without mining
There is no mining (proof of work) and no staking (proof of stake). Each server trusts a list of validators, its Unique Node List, and a new ledger version is final once a large majority agree on the same transactions. This repeats every three to five seconds; validators neither lock up coins nor earn rewards.
Fees are destroyed rather than paid to anyone. A built-in exchange (DEX) lets users issue tokens for dollars or other assets and trade them against XRP. An automated market maker (AMM) arrived in 2024, and Ethereum-style smart contracts run on a separate EVM sidechain, bridged to the ledger, that opened in 2025.
3. Payments business and milestones
Ripple pitches XRP as a bridge currency: a payment firm converts one currency into XRP and then into another, instead of keeping pre-funded accounts abroad. In December 2024 Ripple launched RLUSD, a dollar stablecoin approved by New York’s regulator (NYDFS), and in 2025 it bought the prime broker Hidden Road.
In November 2025 the first US spot XRP ETF, from Canary Capital, began trading on Nasdaq, and in December the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) conditionally approved Ripple National Trust Bank. By autumn 2026, new ledger features such as vaults and native lending were moving through validator votes.
4. Things to know
In December 2020 the SEC sued Ripple for selling XRP as an unregistered security. In July 2023 a court ruled that exchange sales to the public were not investment contracts but institutional sales broke securities law; Ripple was fined $125 million. Both sides dropped their appeals in August 2025, ending the case.
Ripple still holds a large share of XRP in escrow and on its books, so its sales and supply concentration remain a topic. Many servers use default validator lists from Ripple and the XRP Ledger Foundation, and views differ on how decentralized that is. Critics also note gaps between promotion and measurable use in bank payments, so independent data helps.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.