Editor's Note: This article comes fromStar Media STARMEDIA (ID: Star_Media1), Author: Xuesui, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Star Media STARMEDIA (ID: Star_Media1)
, Author: Xuesui, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
Looking at the virtual currency for more than ten years, the centralization and stock issues of Ripple (XRP) are very topical. Compared with other currencies, the price of Ripple has been tepid, and it is called "the unsupportable fool". .
But recently, Ripple, the Ripple currency company, was listed among the top 50 fintech companies in Forbes magazine with a valuation of US$10 billion, triggering a new wave of attention from investors.
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Issuing coins to attack cross-border payment and promote hopeless expansion mode
At present, the financial systems of various countries are self-contained, and there is a lack of uniform cross-border financial settlement standards internationally. Cross-border transfers can only rely on SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication). If you want to send money to foreign friends, the process is as follows:
Therefore, cross-border remittances need to go through multiple institutions for relevant currency application, exchange, and transfer procedures. Not only is the remittance process lengthy, but intermediary banks will also charge high handling fees.
The traditional financial settlement model is very inefficient and can no longer keep up with people's high-paced life needs. Efficient and low-cost financial settlement media seem to have become the rigid needs of the public.
It is this deadlock that Ripple says it is trying to change.
In 2004, Ripple founder Ryan Fuger realized this problem, and set up Ripplepay (ripplepay) company to solve cross-border payments, aiming to realize that international finance can be transmitted in real time and efficiently like Internet data. In 2013, ripplepay officially changed its name to Ripple, focusing on cross-border remittance business and trying to explore ways of cooperation with banking and financial institutions in various countries.
Ripple's original goal is to create a value network protocol (Interledger Protocol). Ideally, in this protocol, currency can be quickly transmitted according to the TCP/IP protocol like Internet data, so that the serious delay between settlements through the middle bank SWIFT can be solved. question.
If the idea can be realized, it can not only solve the problem of low efficiency of traditional cross-border payment, but also save users a large amount of transfer fees.
However, before 2013, Ripple cross-border payments did not make substantial progress. Because Ripple lacks a trusted network environment for currency settlement.
Inspired by the third-party supervision of traditional finance and the rise of Bitcoin, some researchers suggested that Ripple: to meet the decentralization standard of Bitcoin, only 16 trusted verifiers in the RCL network are enough.
If Ripple replaces the verification nodes with third-party node supervision according to Bitcoin, and replaces all Ripple nodes with third-party nodes as the nodes gradually increase, then the advantages of Ripple's decentralization will be more obvious, so that de-centralization can be realized. Centralized trusted web environment?
Following the above ideas, Ripple launched three enterprise-level payment solutions in 2018: Xcurrent, XRapid and XVia.
But careful and knowledgeable people have discovered the secret of Ripple. Among the three new models, only the second XRapid is related to the cryptocurrency XRP, and the other two have nothing to do with it. Moreover, most of the banks and financial institutions that have established cooperation with Ripple have nothing to do with XRP in terms of business cooperation.
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Frequently cash out 700 million US dollars, Ripple currency XRP is scolded as rubbish
"If you want to die, it is very easy for the top management to control the market", this is the main reason why most ordinary investors are not optimistic about XRP.
This view is actually rooted in the issuance and operation mechanism of XRP.
At the beginning of its launch in 2011, the total number of XRP issued was 100 billion, and the founding team retained 20% of the share of about 20 billion, and the market circulation was about 80 billion. Excessive shares are in the hands of the founding members, and there is a potential risk of manipulating and disrupting the market.
Whale Alert mentioned in an analysis that Ripple Chief Technology Officer Jed McCaleb, who is now the co-founder of XLM and the former founder of Mt. Gox, formally reached an agreement with Ripple in September 2019. Resignation settlement agreement, and receive 100 million XRP currency remuneration compensation as part of the resignation settlement agreement.
Whale Alert also found through multi-directional tracking that Jed McCaleb's wallet address holds up to 8 billion XRP. From 2014 to 2019, Whale Alert tracked a total of 1.05 billion XRP in its transfers, with an average sales of 0.129 cents per XRP, and a total sales of $135 million. According to the current sales speed, it would take Jed McCaleb to sell all XRP. Take 20 years.
According to Ripple's official XRP market report for the fourth quarter of 2019, through off-site, Ripple sold a total of US$500 million in XRP in 2019, US$169 million in the first quarter, US$50.12 million in the third quarter, and US$130.8 million in the fourth quarter.
In response to the long-term large-scale cash-out behavior of Ripple’s official members, many XRP investors said that frequent cash-outs can easily cause market panic and drive investors to sell XRP on a large scale, which is not conducive to the long-term development of XRP.
In this regard, Ripple CTO David has publicly responded that XRP itself is a derivative product under the framework of the company's main business cross-border payment, and that through irregular and reasonable release of XRP, it is to provide more research and development funding support for the main business cross-border payment. This type of sale is mainly packaged to off-site financial institutions at wholesale prices, opening up channels for traditional finance and cryptocurrencies, and realizing third-party supervision of cryptocurrencies, and will not directly flow into the market. Not only will it not disrupt the market, but it will guarantee the supply of XRP in the market stability.
The most recent large-scale cash out of Ripple was on February 7 and February 10, 2020, which were 3.3 million and 4.2 million XRP respectively, equivalent to a market value of about 20 million US dollars.
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6 rounds of financing received 300 million U.S. dollars, and the valuation soared to 10 billion U.S. dollars
In 2019, Ripple raised $500 million from the sale of XRP. Foreign media website owler analyzed that Ripple's total revenue in 2019 is expected to be $6.52.
