XRP is now available on Shapeshift

Ripple is a privately owned company based in San Francisco, USA. Ripple Labs, the primary developer for the Ripple payment ecosystem is owned by the board, founders, and employees who began the company in 2012.

While Ryan Fugger began working on a different payment protocol in 2004 called RipplePay, the project started to coalesce in November 2012 with Arthur Britto, Chris Larsen, and Jed McCaleb.

The project was closed source at the time and was later incorporated under a new name, NewCoin, in September 2012. NewCoin rebranded to OpenCoin in October 2012 and then rebranded again, to Ripple Labs, in September 2013. The original Ripple protocol Consensus paper was written in 2014 by David Schwartz, Noah Youngs, and Arthur Britto.

By December 2014 the Ripple Labs team was working with a global payments service called Earthport. The partnership combined Ripple’s software with Earthport’s payment services system and was the first network use of the Ripple protocol before XRP moved to the XRP ledger.

XRP has become a decentralized cryptographic ledger powered by a network of peer-to-peer servers. The ledger is the home of the XRP token, a digital asset designed to bridge the many different currencies in use across the globe. Ripple Labs helped develop XRP, resulting in the creation of 100 billion XRP tokens that are used to run and power the Ripple Network concept.

XRP is currently the third-largest asset on the Brave New Coin Market Cap table. It currently has a market capitalization of US$~9,020,081, and a free float supply of ~44,112,852.111 XRP. The value of the token has risen ~4% in the last week.

In February 2020, One of the original creators, Jed McCaleb, sold US$1 Billion from the XRP he had collected as the project’s original creators and as part of a compensation package when resigned in May 2013. The dump may have the price of XRP to capitulate.

McCaleb received a reported 5.3 billion XRP at the time of leaving Ripple, which he can sell restricted amounts of, based on a 2016 settlement that set yearly limits. On September 7th, 2019, he received a further 100 million XRP. As of February, McCaleb has sold over one billion XRP and holds a remaining 4.7 billion XRP.

On Tuesday, May 19th it was announced that the XRP (XRP) digital payment asset is now on the Shapeshift digital token exchange platform. ShapeShift is a web and API platform created in August of 2014 to provide instant Bitcoin (BTC) and digital asset conversion. The board of directors is lead by Shapeshift founder and CEO, Erik Voorhees, who joined by Kurt Dalton, David Gold of Access Venture Partners, Christian Nagel of Early Bird Ventures.

Shapeshift allows for either Quick or Precise order type. Quick Orders allow you to deposit any amount of funds you’d like to the deposit address that ShapeShift provides without time restrictions while also allowing you to create a reusable deposit address.

The Precise Order type requires you to provide your exact deposit amount in advance. It also forces you to send, and have your deposited coin confirm, within a certain period of time.

On November 20th, 2019, the ShapeShift platform unlocked free crypto trading using a native platform called the FOX token. By holding FOX tokens, users gain access to Commission free transfers between blockchain assets.

On April 17th, 2020, Shapeshift announced that it had acquired Portis. Portis is an Israeli startup that has built a Web 3.0 wallet crypto application developers to easily integrate wallet functionality into their product.