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Ripple: Overview and Outlook

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Trust and Trustworthy Computing (Trust 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9229))

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Abstract

Ripple is a payment system and a digital currency which evolved completely independently of Bitcoin. Although Ripple holds the second highest market cap after Bitcoin, there are surprisingly no studies which analyze the provisions of Ripple.

In this paper, we study the current deployment of the Ripple payment system. For that purpose, we overview the Ripple protocol and outline its security and privacy provisions in relation to the Bitcoin system. We also discuss the consensus protocol of Ripple. Contrary to the statement of the Ripple designers, we show that the current choice of parameters does not prevent the occurrence of forks in the system. To remedy this problem, we give a necessary and sufficient condition to prevent any fork in the system. Finally, we analyze the current usage patterns and trade dynamics in Ripple by extracting information from the Ripple global ledger. As far as we are aware, this is the first contribution which sheds light on the current deployment of the Ripple system.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Available from s1.ripple.com.

  2. 2.

    Available from s-east.ripple.com, and s-west.ripple.com.

  3. 3.

    Recall that Ripple has no means to enforce the execution of payments.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ludovic Barman for the help in extracting the relevant statistics from the Ripple ledgers.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Frederik Armknecht

  2. NEC Laboratories Europe, 69115, Heidelberg, Germany

    Ghassan O. Karame & Franck Youssef

  3. University of Applied Sciences, Offenburg, Germany

    Avikarsha Mandal & Erik Zenner

Authors
  1. Frederik Armknecht
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  2. Ghassan O. Karame
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  3. Avikarsha Mandal
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  4. Franck Youssef
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  5. Erik Zenner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ghassan O. Karame .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Mauro Conti

  2. Intel Labs, Darmstadt, Germany

    Matthias Schunter

  3. - Hellas (FORTH), Crete, Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation for Research & Technology, Heraklion, Greece

    Ioannis Askoxylakis

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Armknecht, F., Karame, G.O., Mandal, A., Youssef, F., Zenner, E. (2015). Ripple: Overview and Outlook. In: Conti, M., Schunter, M., Askoxylakis, I. (eds) Trust and Trustworthy Computing. Trust 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9229. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22846-4_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22846-4_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22845-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22846-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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