Introduction to the Ripple Whitepaper.

The Ripple Network is a network for global financial transactions. Ripple has been created in 2012 by Ripple Labs Inc. and their mission is to enable banks to transfer money to each other in a faster and more secure way. To enable these fast transactions Ripple has created the cryptocurrency XRP, which runs on the Riiple blockchain, called thethe Ripple Consensus Protocol Ledger (XRPL). The XRPL works as a distributed economic system that not only tracks transactions and accounting information, but also offers exchange services for a large number of currency pairs. Ripple presents the XRPL as an open source distributed ledger that can process financial transactions in real time. These transactions are secured and verified by the network participants and a consensus mechanism.

Read more about Ripple White Paper in the abstract below:

While several consensus algorithms exist for the Byzantine Generals Problem, specifically as it pertains to distributed payment systems, many suffer from high latency induced by the requirement that all nodes within the network communicate synchronously.

In this work, we present a novel consensus algorithm that circumvents this requirement by utilizing collectively-trusted subnetworks within the larger network. We show that the “trust” required of these subnetworks is in fact minimal and can be further reduced with principled choice of the member nodes.

In addition, we show that minimal connectivity is required to maintain agreement throughout the whole network. The result is a low-latency consensus algorithm which still maintains robustness in the face of Byzantine failures. We present this algorithm in its embodiment in the Ripple Protocol.