XRP

XRP is the native asset of the XRP Ledger, a payment network that settles in seconds and was designed from the start for moving value between currencies rather than for running programs. There is no mining and no staking: validators run the consensus protocol without being paid in newly issued tokens, because there are none.

The entire supply of one hundred billion units was created at launch. That single fact separates XRP from most of the assets in this domain: there is no issuance schedule to model, only a distribution schedule. Supply falls very slightly over time because each transaction destroys a tiny fee rather than paying it to anyone.

The asset is closely associated with one company, which holds a large portion of the supply and develops payment products around the ledger. That association is why regulatory questions about the company reprice the asset, and why the market treats corporate announcements as asset news in a way that has no equivalent for bitcoin.

The intended use is cross-border settlement: converting one currency into XRP, moving it across the ledger in seconds, and converting it out at the other end - a bridge asset that removes the need to pre-fund accounts in every destination country. For a payments firm, the capital freed by not pre-funding is the entire commercial argument.

Alongside that sits ordinary exchange trading, which accounts for most volume by value, and a modest set of on-ledger applications: a built-in decentralised exchange, issued tokens and payment channels.

The honest caveat is that measuring genuine settlement usage from the outside is hard. On-ledger transaction counts include exchange internal transfers and market-making, so a rise in activity does not automatically mean a rise in payment corridor volume.