XRP

XRP is the native token of the XRP Ledger, an open-source blockchain launched in 2012 by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto. Ripple Labs, the San Francisco company most associated with XRP, has built an entire payments business on top of the ledger, but the two are technically separate. The XRPL was designed for one thing above all else: moving value across borders faster and cheaper than the legacy banking system.

The XRP Ledger uses a federated consensus protocol instead of mining or traditional staking. Validator nodes propose transaction sets every 3 to 5 seconds, and once 80% of validators on a node's Unique Node List agree, the transaction is confirmed with deterministic finality. That means no probabilistic waiting, no rollback risk. The network handles roughly 1,500 TPS in production, with tests exceeding 65,000 TPS. Fees sit around 0.00001 XRP per transaction (about $0.0002), and those fees are burned rather than paid to validators. The XRPL also has a native decentralized exchange built directly into the protocol, which lets users swap any issued token on-ledger without smart contracts.

Ripple's ISO 20022 connection is the strongest in the crypto space, full stop. RippleNet joined the ISO 20022 Registration Management Group in 2020, making it the first DLT-focused member alongside central banks like the Bank of England and payment networks like Visa. RippleNet natively carries ISO 20022-structured data in its payment messages. David Schwartz has clarified that XRP the token is not itself "ISO 20022 compliant" because ISO 20022 is a messaging standard, not an asset certification. But the network that moves XRP speaks the language fluently. That distinction matters.

Ripple claims over 300 financial institution partnerships. SBI Holdings in Japan has been the most visible, running SBI Remit on RippleNet for years. Santander's One Pay FX used Ripple technology for cross-border payments across Europe and Latin America. MoneyGram had a high-profile partnership that demonstrated real transaction volume. In stablecoin territory, Ripple launched RLUSD in late 2024, a dollar-backed stablecoin designed to complement XRP in institutional payment flows. Daily spot volume regularly exceeds $1 billion.

2025 was the year XRP's regulatory cloud finally lifted. The SEC and Ripple settled their four-year lawsuit. Ripple paid $50 million of the original $125 million escrow, with the rest returned. Both sides dropped their appeals in August 2025. Judge Torres's original ruling stood: XRP is not a security when sold on public exchanges. On the ETF front, the SEC approved spot XRP ETFs from Grayscale, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, and others. Those spot products pulled in nearly $1 billion in net inflows by December 2025 without a single day of outflows.

Watch for three things. First, whether Ripple can convert its payment partnerships into measurable on-chain volume, because partnerships alone have not moved the needle on XRPL transaction counts the way bulls expected. Second, the XRPL Hooks amendment, currently in security review, would bring native smart contract capability to the ledger and could open up DeFi use cases. Third, RLUSD adoption among institutional corridors will signal whether Ripple can compete in the stablecoin market alongside USDC and USDT.