"Ripple is a goofy business. For more than a decade now, the company has held vast quantities of magic beans known as XRP, which it dumps onto the market at regular intervals. It's not clear why anyone needs these magic beans, but people buy them anyway, and that has made Ripple very rich-so rich that this week it casually spent $1 billion to buy a treasury management company called GTreasury."
"The firm opened up shop in 2012 as something called OpenCoin. The company soon after created XRP, which stood out from other early cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin. Instead of creating a mining system to dribble new tokens out slowly, XRP's creators just waved a wand and created the whole supply at once-100 billion of them to be exact. XRP gained value since it is one of the first cryptocurrencies, and because Ripple's early team consisted of very highly regarded blockchain technologists."
Ripple holds massive pre-mined XRP reserves and regularly sells tokens to the market to fund operations. The company spent $1 billion acquiring GTreasury. XRP was created in 2012 after the firm launched as OpenCoin, with the entire 100 billion supply issued at once rather than mined. XRP gained early value because of its senior blockchain technologists and timing among early cryptocurrencies. XRP lacks a clear, widely accepted utility compared with Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ripple's ledger technology functions for cross-border transfers, and executives promoted XRP as a "bridge currency", but banks resisted dependence on Ripple's infrastructure.
Read at Fortune Crypto
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