XRP, a Ripple-affiliated cryptocurrency, recently celebrated its tenth birthday. The XRP Ledger platform was released in June 2012 and has been running smoothly ever since.
On this day, 10 years ago, Ripple Labs co-founder Arthur Britto submitted lines of code that created 100 billion #XRP #tokens.
— GateHub (@GateHub) June 2, 2022
Happy birthday $XRP! ??#XRPCommunity #cryptocurrencies pic.twitter.com/lIjckmwTQi
Except for Bitcoin and Dogecoin, it is the only original cryptocurrency that has remained among the top cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization. Ripple Labs co-founders Arthur Britto, David Schwartz, and Jed McCaleb began working on the XRP Ledger in 2011. Schwartz made his first commitment in November of 2011.
Britto uploaded lines of code on June 2, 2012, which generated 100 billion tokens known as “XNS.”
Nonetheless, since the ledger was reset several times owing to bugs, the cryptocurrency’s oldest transaction history has been erased. The current XRP Ledger version was launched in December 2012.
On the XRP Ledger, more than 72 million ledgers have been confirmed as of today, with a total of 807,000 transactions.
Britto, McCaleb, and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen each received a significant percentage of the 100 billion coins (20%). After creating a new startup called NewCoin, he joined the engineers (which was rebranded to OpenCoin shortly after its launch). In 2013, OpenCoin was rebranded as Ripple. The majority of the pre-mined tokens were received by the company (80 percent).
XRP witnessed a tremendous surge in 2017, surging more than 32,000 percent and briefly becoming the second cryptocurrency, despite claims of centralization.
Ripple controlled 55 percent of the entire supply at the end of 2017. It said at the time that it would keep the tokens in escrow for 55 months to keep selling pressure at bay.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple in late 2020 for allegedly selling XRP illegally. The token, according to the regulator, is unregistered security. The lawsuit is yet to be settled, even though it is expected to have far-reaching repercussions for the whole industry.
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