What is XRP

The $27 Trillion Problem XRP Was Built to Solve Part 2 of 5: What the XRP Ledger actually does, and the arithmetic nobody runs Reading time: ~10 minutes In Part 1 , we left off with a puzzle: Ripple the company is thriving while XRP the token is down 72% from its peak. To understand why, you need to know what XRP was actually designed to do. The good news is that it's a real problem, it's expensive, and the solution is legitimately clever. The awkward news is what happens when you do the math on how much XRP that solution actually requires anyone to own. Let's take those in order. First, the ledger itself — in plain English The XRP Ledger is a shared record of who owns what, maintained by a few hundred computers around the world. It's been running continuously since 2012. What makes it unusual is how those computers agree on the record. I'll keep this brief, because the mechanics matter less than the consequences. Bitcoin's approach: thousands of machines race to solve a meaningless math puzzle. Winner writes the next page of the ledger and gets paid in new bitcoin. Security comes from the sheer cost of the electricity — to cheat, you'd need more computing power than everyone else combined. Ethereum's approach: participants lock up money as collateral. Try to cheat, lose your collateral. Security comes from having skin in the game. The XRP Ledger's approach: a set of known, reputable servers — universities, exchanges, businesses, individuals — simply compare notes every few seconds. When at least 80% of the servers you personally trust agree on which transactions happened, that's settled. Move on. The consequences of that design are what you actually need to know: Settlement time 3–5 seconds Transaction fee About one thousandth of a cent What happens to the fee It's destroyed — nobody receives it Capacity Around 1,500 transactions per second Energy use Comparable to roughly 20,000 households — versus a small country for Bitcoin Rewards for running a server None…