Ripple is a privately-held US-based fintech company (Ripple Labs Inc.) that provides a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network.
Unlike Bitcoin that caters to peer-to-peer transfer, the main goal of Ripple is to connect banks, payment providers and digital asset exchanges, enabling faster and cost-efficient global payments.
Ripple Labs Inc., created XRP Ledger (XRPL), an open-source, permissionless and decentralized blockchain technology, that can settle transactions in 3-5 seconds. These financial transactions are secured and verified by the participants of the network through a consensus mechanism known as the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA).
XRP is the native digital currency to the XRP Ledger. XRP holds the third largest market capitalization, behind Bitcoin and Ethereum. The total supply of XRP is capped at 100 billion tokens.