Best Ripple Alternatives You Shouldn’t Overlook !
Ripple, more than a cryptocurrency, is known for its digital payment protocol that acts as currency exchange, real-time gross settlement system, and remittance network. It is also considered as a strong competitor to SWIFT.
First released in 2012 by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb, its mission is to revolutionize the international payment remittance system through blockchain technology.
Its open-source and peer-to-peer decentralized network offers seamless and affordable cross-border remittance.
Its native currency, XRP, acts as a bridge currency to other currencies to support transactions on Ripple & global network. This ensures quick liquidity and smooth transactions of money in any form.
Ripple offers a unique proposition to financial institutions and businesses to simplify their international payment system but is not alone in the game.
Let us look at some best Ripple alternatives:
Best Ripple Alternatives 2019-2020
#1. Stellar Lumen
Stellar is the close competitor of Ripple and is co-founded by ex-Ripple co-founder Jeb McCaleb in 2014.
The Stellar network is similar to Ripple and focuses on connecting the established financial institutions to the blockchain, through its decentralized payment network.
Its native currency, XLM, serves as a medium, which connects financial institutions, payment systems, and people enabling transactions in multiple currencies.
Stellar claims to complete a transaction in flat 3-5 second, with a fee as low as 1/600,000 of a cent per transaction.
How different is Stellar from Ripple?
McCaleb’s separated from Ripple because of the differences in ideology.
His passion is to serve the unbanked and poor, who don’t have access to low-cost financial services, and that led to the formation of Stellar. For that reason, Stellar prefers to call itself a non-profit organization.
Other technical differences:
- Stellar uses its consensus mechanism called the “Stellar Consensus Protocol,” while Ripple uses “Proof-of-Correctness.”
- Stellar adds 1% inflation to XLM tokens every year, a similar characteristic of real-world fiat-money
As both have a different area of operation and operates with different objectives, it has to be seen, which model will succeed in the long term.
#2. OmiseGo
Founded in 2017, OmiseGo is a peer-to-peer decentralized payment network, which allows users a quick and safe transfer of value in different cryptocurrencies.
Unlike Ripple and Stellar, which has its own consensus mechanism, OmiseGo is an Ethereum- based proof-of-stake (PoS) platform, powered by ERC-20 token standard.
With the phrase, “Unbank the Banked” OmiseGo platform has not restricted itself to cross-border remittance and payment settlement.
It supports a wide array of financial transactions such as B2B commerce, loyalty program activity, asset management, payroll deposits, supply chain finance, and other financial services in a fully decentralized and affordable way.
Its goal is to remove the inefficiencies among payment processors, gateways, and financial institutions to smoothen the value transfer process across borders.
#3. Nano
Nano (XRB) is a bit different from Ripple and is more of a peer-to-peer digital currency like any other cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin.
Its primary objective is to replace fiat currency and remove inefficiencies present in existing cryptocurrencies. It was launched in 2015 by a software engineer Colin LeMahieu and was initially known as Raiblocks. It was rebranded as Nano in early 2018.
Compared to other cryptocurrencies, Nano uses directed acyclic graph technology (DAG), which helps it to offer its blockchain to each individual, infinite scalability, instant and real-time settlement, zero-fee transactions, and low energy consumption.
In short, it is just a payment currency that aims to become a preferred payment alternative for everyday use for consumers.
#4. Litecoin
Litecoin (LTC) is an old fork of Bitcoin and is referred to as silver against Bitcoin’s gold comparison. Created in early 2011 by Charlie Lee, an ex-Google engineer, Litecoin shares many similarities with Bitcoin and regarded an improved version of Bitcoin.
It is a peer-to-peer digital currency that allows an instant, near-zero fee payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Compared to Bitcoin, Litecoin allows a faster and cheaper transaction, thus making it suitable for smaller and frequent day-to-day transactions.
Both Litecoin and Ripple are similar to each other, but there is one key difference.
Ripple serves only a single purpose, that is cross-border payment settlement to large corporations, whereas, Litecoin is useful for more purpose that includes both cross-border and peer-to-peer transaction.
#5. Bitcoin Cash
Compared to any other cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the most discussed and widely covered cryptocurrency of recent times.
It was initially forked from the Bitcoin network on 1st August 2017 in a bid to increase the block space, allowing more transactions to be processed and reduce the transaction fee.
Bitcoin Cash is peer-to-peer electronic cash, similar to the Bitcoin, but eliminates the inefficiencies of Bitcoin like high transaction costs and high waiting time with more throughput. It aims to become a preferred medium for daily transactions with ultra-low-cost transactions and no chargebacks.
#6. DigiByte
DigiByte (DGB) is more than a payment medium and offers multiple use cases for users. Its UTXO PoW based blockchain focuses on cybersecurity, payments, Digi-assets, and secure communication technologies.
Apart from various use-cases, it boasts superior technical features that give it an edge over other cryptocurrencies.
- Fastest public blockchain with 15 seconds block timings
- Uses multi-algorithm mining that prevents centralization of mining and 51% network attack
- A highly decentralized network with over 100,000 nodes worldwide
- Lets user validates any contract or document and stores it on Digibyte’s decentralized blockchain. Using SegWit, it keeps the blockchain separate for transaction confirmation and information storing.
With its highly scalable and secured blockchain network, DigiByte can support the evolving needs of humanity.
Being different from Ripple, DigiByte might get ignored due to the lack of partnerships & financial support, but its features are surely worth to take note of.
That’s all from my side today and now I want to hear from you: What do you think of Ripple as a cryptocurrency? Do you think we need its alternatives or Bitcoin will be enough to replace all these currencies including Ripple?
Let me know in the comments section below 🙂
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