Who owns Ripple?

Ripple Labs has made quite a mark for itself in the digital market and has quite been the talk of the fintech town. People have been getting quite excited about this platform, which is a digital currency exchange, real time gross settlement system, and payment protocol. Ripple was created by the Ripple Company. They claim to offer a medium to send money globally and ensuring that it is done so by giving its customers a frictionless experience. Ripple is majorly a distributed open source protocol with a shared distributed ledger and it also offers the decentralized digital asset or digital currency called XRP. It is this which is being popularised under the name of Ripple and is owned by Ripple Labs.

The company Ripple was founded in 2012 with its headquarters in San Francisco, California, United States. It majorly falls under the computer software industry and was renamed in 2015 to Ripple Labs. It serves a worldwide user base and is quite popular amongst several traders, investors, digital currency enthusiasts and many more people.

Key people in Ripple

The key people that have been involved with Ripple Labs are Alan Safahi, Advisory Board, Ryan Fugger, and Concept Originator. Joining these people are also, David Schwartz, Chief Cryptographer, Ken Kurson, Advisory Board, and Brad Garlinghouse, Chief Executive Officer. The major products that the Ripple Labs provide to its users and clients is Ripple payment and an exchange network.

As of 3 July, 2018, the exchange rate for the Ripple currency is $0.05 and the market cap for the same is $39.134 billion. Moreover, it boasts of a great circulation supply of 39,009,215,838 XRP. However, this is a limited quantity digital currency just like Bitcoin and has a circulation supply limit of 100,000,000,000 XRP.

It can handle about 1500 transactions per second which is quite a remarkable job in itself. This is one of the reasons why it has become so popular amongst the world population interested in this kind of a product or service.

If the company researches and makes further developments to scale the entire Ripple network, it could offer to its users and clients the same throughput as of the one provided by Visa. Visa has been handling about 50000 transactions per second. (Throughput is defined as the amount of transactions passing through a process or a system in a stipulated amount of time).

Ripple Labs

The founders of Ripple Labs, who own Ripple, are Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb. On paper, Chris Larsen is now worth almost $59.9 billion which is way more than what the founders of Google are worth, on paper. This major event has come up resulting to the recent digital currency market price surge in the digital market and has brought about quite a stunning change of events.

Ripple is not Decentralized

What is interesting to note here is that Ripple or XRP is supposed to be a decentralized digital currency platform however Ripple itself is privately owned by Ripple Labs. By standard definitions of a digital currency, Ripple does not even exactly qualify to be a decentralized virtual currency because it is privately owned. Ripple is a big major player in the entire digital currency market and is a strong contender. The current valuation of Ripple, when compared to other privately owned companies like Airbnb and Uber.

So after all, when other digital currency platforms like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, etc are not owned privately by anyone and is a completely decentralized platform. So like we say that the creator of Bitcoin is Satoshi Nakamoto, but he does not own it, moreover people do not even know who he exactly is. Contrary to this, going against the norms of a standard digital currency, Ripple is actually privately owned by Ripple Labs. It is not of the people or for the people and is not managed by these developers or volunteers like in Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, Ripple is managed and operated by Ripple Labs.

Although many say that the XRP protocol can run without the Ripple company supporting it, it is still managed by them and they continue to make herculean profits off this digital currency. So much so that they currently stand at the second position in the digital market capitalisation and thus puts it in a very major and dominating position in this fintech world.