Ripple has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, but it’s still not as well-known as some of the more established digital currencies on the market.
However, Ripple offers plenty of benefits, which make it an excellent option for international money transfers.
Here are seven reasons why you should use Ripple to send money overseas.
Cost
The native cryptocurrency, XRP, is used to pay transaction fees on all transactions. At present, each transaction costs around $0.0004. If you use 100 tokens (which is approximately $1), you’ll only need 40 cents’ worth of XRP to complete a single transfer; that’s an incredibly small fee compared to what banks typically charge for international transfers ($25+).
And since each token can be divided into 1000 sub-units called drops-meaning 1 XRP = 1,000 drops-it’s easy to see how affordable it can be to make lots of transactions when using XRP. In terms of purchasing XRP itself, as mentioned above, there are several ways to buy XRP.
Some exchanges accept traditional currency and credit cards, while others only accept cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ether. In addition, if you have an account with Coinbase or Gemini, both companies offer instant purchases using your bank account.
Speed
While other money transfer solutions take days to process, Ripple’s real-time system takes seconds. And there are no pesky fees and foreign exchange charges to worry about. Your transfer will be executed at lightning speed whether you’re sending $100 or $100 million.
Security: While blockchain technology can make transferring funds safer, it also offers a degree of anonymity that isn’t often provided by traditional money transfer solutions. This means that your information is safe with Ripple, but so is your personal data-your name or address is never shared with another party when you send a transaction.
Transparency
By creating a shared public database, you’re letting people know what’s happening with their money. One of Bitcoin’s biggest selling points is its truthfulness-there’s no central authority to appeal to if something goes wrong-and that principle of transparency is also at work in Ripple.
When somebody sends money through a Ripple gateway, information about that transaction is publicly broadcast across nodes on Ripple’s network; it doesn’t remain private and isolated like it would using Bitcoin.
While that might seem risky, remember that all transactions are verified by consensus among other members of the network. That means fraudsters can’t easily attack individual users’ funds or steal them.
Low Risk
One of Ripple’s biggest advantages is that it’s incredibly easy to use. To send money, you simply settle your balance with a friend. That means you simply choose how much money you want to transfer and press send.
There are no middlemen or intermediaries, which allows for cheaper transactions overall. The entire process also only takes about 4 seconds-compared to several days with banks-and costs less than a penny per transaction.
And there are no fees (or at least very small ones) on transactions under $10; any amount over that incurs a tiny fee of 0.00001 XRP, but compared to even typical credit card fees, it’s still pennies per dollar transferred.
Decentralized
At its core, a distributed ledger is a shared database that is spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions. One of blockchain’s greatest strengths is security. The blockchain security model is based on cryptographic principles, such as digital signatures and cryptographic hashing, to generate unique digital fingerprints for data.
Data stored on a blockchain exists as blocks that hold batches of valid transactions. No single entity can corrupt or hack the data on a blockchain because blockchains are decentralized across every computer that has a full copy of the ledger.
Updates are accepted by nodes (i.e., computers) sequentially and automatically, making it nearly impossible to alter existing blocks or insert fraudulent blocks between them.
User Friendly
Because it’s open-source, Ripple’s protocol can be customized and integrated with applications to support a wide range of use cases. Another benefit to using Ripple is that its distributed ledger technology makes it a user-friendly global payments solution.
By connecting directly to financial institutions and operating on a cryptographically secure shared public database (the ledger), payments using XRP are fast and secure, and settlement occurs in four seconds or less.
This eliminates much of today’s friction and costs of cross-border payments. In addition, because XRP exists natively within the ledger, there are no foreign exchange fees-eliminating yet another set of fees paid by consumers today when sending international transactions.
Security
Unlike most cryptocurrencies, XRP Ledger uses a trusted federated consensus mechanism that relies on a few designated validators to approve transactions. These validators are run by reputable, trusted organizations that have built up trust over many years.
Organizations such as American Express and Bank of America use their systems to transfer money between themselves in seconds with Ripple. The network is designed so that it can survive if some of these organizations stop running servers or if one organization gets attacked. This means you never have to worry about losing your money due to a hack.