Ripple

Ripple Labs is a California-based fintech company, originally founded in 2012 (building on an earlier 2004 concept), that built the distributed ledger known as the XRP Ledger (XRPL) and the digital asset XRP that runs on it. The company's business is cross-border payment infrastructure for banks and payment providers, sold under products like RippleNet and On-Demand Liquidity, which use XRP as a bridge currency to move value between currencies without pre-funded accounts abroad.

The XRP Ledger does not use mining or staking. Instead it relies on a consensus mechanism called the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA), in which a network of independent validators agrees on transaction order roughly every 3 to 5 seconds. This gives the ledger very low fees and high transactions per second compared with proof-of-work chains, along with a much smaller energy footprint. All 100 billion XRP were created at the network's launch, with a large share held by Ripple Labs and released gradually through scheduled escrow.

Ripple spent nearly five years fighting a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit alleging XRP was sold as an unregistered security. Courts ultimately drew a line between XRP itself, which is not a security, and certain institutional sales, which were. The case formally closed in 2025 when both sides dropped their appeals, clearing the way for broader XRP ETF and exchange listings.

Because the company and the token share a name and origin, "Ripple" is often used loosely to mean XRP, even though technically Ripple is the company and XRP is the asset.