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.
Ripple announced this year that several big money-transfer companies, including Western Union and MoneyGram, were doing pilot programs with XRP.
The chief executive of Western Union said last month that its first few transactions with XRP had not shown any noticeable benefits over the company’s existing systems, but the company would continue trying it out
Currencies Direct is among a handful of smaller companies have also tried out XRP. The British outfit moved money between the United States and Mexico, and found XRP “on par or slightly cheaper” than its existing method, said Brian Harris, the company’s chief product officer.
price predictions 2018---
Keeping all of these factors in mind, many of the cryptocurrency experts from different sources like fxstreet, express.co.uk, investingpr believe that Ripple can end the year around more than triple or 3-5 dollars. This will almost be a 10-time rise from the current levels. They say this is the reason why it is one of the best investment opportunities of this very year. If indeed, it can rise to $ 8-$ 10, the market cap of Ripple will be around for 20. Even though in the present scenario, it might seem like a lot and even more than Bitcoin but the price predictions for Bitcoin in 2018 are also pretty bullish. This is the reason why the market cap of Bitcoin will be even higher during the 2nd half of this calendar year.