What is Ripple?

Banks do billions of transactions everyday within the country and across the borders. Banks with no direct relationship rely on intermediaries in order to send payments to each other. You must be aware of the high fees you pay and the amount of days it takes to reach the receiver. It would be fast if you catch a plane and deliver it to the receiver.
The world has moved so fast that I am talking about money being sent in seconds like an email. To fill this gap, Ripple plans to speed up settlement with more transparent fees.
Ripple's big idea is to use XRP once its market cap gets high enough and with a great number of daily transactions, to provide banks with liquidity on demand. During a transaction, a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar would be converted by market makers into XRP and almost instantly swapped back into another fiat currency.
Released in 2012, Ripple intents to enable, secure, instant and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks. Instead of exchanging Ripple directly for goods and services like a traditional currency, the Ripple currency is a medium for converting any currency instantly into any other one, without relying on a central exchange. Because of this unique architecture, there are no retailers who directly accept XRP, but Ripple do have the potential to allow for more trade in many existing fiat or crypto currencies.

How does Ripple work?

There is no option to generate XRP by mining; Ripple can only be obtained by buying the currency from various exchanges. A total of 100 billion XRP has been created once the project was launched. A few coins are destroyed every time a transaction takes place. Ripple doesn’t use proof of work like Bitcoin or proof of stake which Ethereum is trying to implement. It uses consensus ledger.
Ripple Consensus Ledger is a pool of ledgers maintained by a network of computers that keep and track the evolution of its Ledger. New transactions are only accepted if a super majority of network validators agree to include them in the ledgers, which makes it secure. This way, the Ripple Consensus Ledger produces ledgers in a decentralised way, without a central authority, that offers a payment and a trading platform to anyone connected to the Internet. Payments in the Ripple Consensus Ledger are fast, cheap, final and irreversible.

Growing adoption by banks:
Ripple has experienced a growing adoption by banks and they are constantly experimenting integration with Ripple. These banks have adopted Ripple to improve their cross-border payments. There are big names like Standard Chartered, Santander, Royal Bank of Canada, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, Axis Bank and many more.

Concerns about Ripple:
My first concern is, the ripple token XRP is currently issued out at less than 40% of its total. The creators of Ripple retain 20% and the remaining is held by Ripple Labs to distribute whenever and however they so wish. Ripple Labs is actually a company and is very different from Bitcoin because Bitcoin is fully decentralized and doesn’t have a central controlling authority. Ripple Labs is registered in many countries and it could be sued and held under police. This makes it different from other Blockchain Crypto currencies.
Unlike other crypto currencies in the market, XRP is tied to and majority owned by a single company. To eliminate the concerns that it’s token XRP will be flooded in the market, it is on the verge of locking billions of dollars inside dozens of smart contracts designed to hold value in escrow until a certain time or certain conditions have been met. By the end of 2017, the company will put 55 billion XRP into escrow and will unleash up to a billion into the market each month. Thus the investors will have the sense of what is coming.
My second concern is centralisation. Ripple is technically a public Blockchain, but is an interesting standout because it is built with a public-based architecture but is privately controlled through centralised ownership of the underlying currency and closed-source software. Whatever gains it had through decentralisation are mostly lost due to the closed nature, which can be used to harm the network at any time the owning company, Ripple Labs Inc., makes any changes themselves.

So Crypto enthusiast these are my thoughts and a bit of research on Ripple. “1 topic, thousand views, you better be rational’.