Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system that also supports fiat currency, cryptocurrency, and commodity exchanges and remittances. The native cryptocurrency of the platform are Ripples, abbreviated as XRP.

Ripple was made by the Ripple company, but can function without it due to its shared ledger. Used by companies such as UniCredit, UBS and Santander, Ripple has been increasingly adopted by banks and payment networks as settlement infrastructure technology because of the payment’s speed within the network, stability of the technology, and the ability to its coin as a bridge currency.

There were 100 billion XRP created at Ripple's inception, which is the currency’s cap according to the protocol's rules. Of the 100 billion created, 20 billion XRP were retained by the creators and the remaining 80% of the total were given to Ripple Labs for sale.