XRP

XRP is the native asset of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), an open-source ledger that, according to the XRPL's own history page, first launched in June 2012. Three engineers built it: David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto. Chris Larsen joined them shortly afterward and the group started the company NewCoin in September 2012, which was renamed OpenCoin and is now Ripple. Ripple is the company most associated with XRP, but the ledger and the company are technically separate. The XRPL was designed specifically for payments, with moving value across borders faster and cheaper than the legacy banking system as its central use case.

The XRP Ledger uses the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol instead of mining or traditional staking. Each server works from a Unique Node List (UNL) of validators it trusts, and the XRPL documentation describes a supermajority of at least 80% of those validators as the threshold for validating a set of transactions. xrpl.org says transactions settle in about 3 to 5 seconds, and once a ledger version is validated it is treated as final rather than probabilistically confirmed. On throughput, the figure most often repeated is 1,500 transactions per second: that comes from a 2017 XRPL load-test post reporting that the ledger could sustain 1,500 TPS on commodity hardware. It is a benchmark, not a measured rate for today's live network, and we have not verified any higher figure. The minimum cost for a standard transaction is 10 drops (0.00001 XRP), and that fee is destroyed (burned) rather than paid to validators, though it can rise when the network is busy. The XRPL also includes a native decentralized exchange built into the protocol, so issued tokens can be traded on-ledger.

Ripple's ISO 20022 connection is the best documented in crypto. ISO's own Registration Management Group (RMG) member list, in a copy archived in March 2026, includes RippleNet alongside members such as the Bank of England, the BIS, the ECB, Mastercard, SWIFT, and VISA International. Ripple announced in a June 2020 post that it had joined the RMG as the first member focused on distributed ledger technology, and says RippleNet has been aligned with ISO 20022 since the start. We could not verify message-level specifics, such as exactly how RippleNet's On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) flows map onto individual ISO 20022 message types. ISO 20022 is a financial messaging standard, not an asset certification, so XRP the token is not itself "ISO 20022 compliant." Any ISO 20022 claim applies to the payment network and its messaging, not to the coin. That distinction matters.

Ripple cited more than 300 customers in its June 2020 announcement; we could not verify a current figure. SBI Remit launched RippleNet's first live ODL implementation in Japan in July 2021, using XRP to reduce pre-funding for payments from Japan to the Philippines. Santander's One Pay FX app, released in 2018, was built on Ripple's xCurrent software. MoneyGram is a cautionary example: Ripple and MoneyGram announced in March 2021 that they were ending their partnership, saying they had processed billions of dollars through RippleNet and ODL together. In stablecoins, Ripple issues RLUSD, a US-dollar stablecoin that Ripple says has approval from the New York Department of Financial Services and the Dubai Financial Services Authority.

The legal record is more nuanced than "the case was settled." On July 13, 2023, the court in SEC v. Ripple Labs ruled for the SEC on Ripple's institutional sales of XRP, holding they were unregistered securities offerings, and ruled for the defendants on Ripple's programmatic sales on exchanges. The court entered a final judgment on August 7, 2024, imposing a $125,035,150 civil penalty and an injunction against violating the registration provisions of the Securities Act. In May 2025 the SEC and Ripple asked the court to cut the penalty to $50 million and dissolve the injunction; the court denied that request on May 15, 2025. On August 7, 2025, both sides dismissed their appeals, and the SEC states that the final judgment, including the $125,035,150 penalty and the injunction, remains in effect. Separately, the SEC and CFTC's March 17, 2026 joint interpretation names XRP among the crypto assets the Commission concludes are digital commodities. On the ETF side, Canary's spot XRP ETF (ticker XRPC) began operating on Nasdaq in November 2025, and Ripple's own ETF roundup lists Bitwise, Grayscale, Franklin Templeton, and 21Shares products launching around the same time.

Watch for three things. First, whether Ripple can turn payments relationships into sustained on-chain volume, because partnerships announced years ago do not by themselves show current usage. Second, whether the XRPL adds broader smart-contract-style programmability; we did not confirm any such feature as live on the XRPL mainnet, so treat that as an open question rather than a roadmap fact. Third, RLUSD adoption in institutional payment corridors, which will show whether Ripple can compete in the stablecoin market alongside larger dollar stablecoins.