In this video from Whiteboard Crypto, they take a look at Ripple, the company behind the XRP token and a more centralised token compared to others in this world of DeFi. It's built for banks and other financial institutions to enable them to send/transfer money overseas. The traditional system has problem in time, cost and risk and usually utilise the SWIFT network.
To combat the problems in this traditional network, Ripple built Ripplenet/xCurrent to facilitate that transfer and do so more quickly and cheaply than SWIFT leading to large institutions using their tools.
The crypto XRP is available for everyday investors to utilise and it is fast with transactions occurring quickly (less than 5 seconds) and cheap to transact ($0.0002) and XRP is needed to utilise the xCurrent system.
In order to verify transactions it does not do the PoS/PoW (Proof of Stake or Proof of Work) models but rather uses a Unique Node List which is effectively a set of trusted nodes using a majority rules approach to doing this. The issue with this is that there's no reward system to verify these transactions which leads to speculation of price manipulation through collution. This along with SEC issues they've
The video then goes through Centralisation vs Decentralisation as well as the tokenomics of XRP. Demand-wise, XRP appears to have natural demand as its used as part of XRP transactions and in terms of supply, it has a fixed supply of 100 billion coins (27 to founders and rippleLabs, 40 billion to companies/individuals and 1 billion released per month).
Whiteboard Crypto highlights how stablecoins could also solve the cross-border coin transfer problem so keep an eye out for that at the end of the video as well as insight into how they do their research (including digging into Discord channels of the tokens they research). Something you might want to try for yourself.
