XRP is the native cryptocurrency for products developed by Ripple Labs. Its products are used for payment settlement, asset exchange, and remittance systems that work more like SWIFT, a service for international money and security transfers used by a network of banks and financial intermediaries.3

XRP is pre-mined and uses a less complicated method of the mining as compared to Bitcoin.

The company was founded as a peer-to-peer trust network that leveraged social media. Users within a network could bypass banks and make loans and open credit lines with each other. But the network failed to take off.

In 2012, three years after Bitcoin ushered in the cryptocurrency era, Ripple changed tracks and became OpenCoin—a network for money transfers where large businesses and financial services firms acted as counterparties to transactions.4

XRP, its cryptocurrency, was launched in the same year with 80 billion tokens going to the company and 20 billion to its co-founders. The purpose of XRP was to serve as an intermediate mechanism of exchange between two currencies or networks. OpenCoin became Ripple Labs in September 2013.5

Ripple describes itself as a global payments network and counts major banks and financial services amongst its customers. XRP is used in its products to facilitate quick conversion between different currencies.