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.
Available from s1.ripple.com.
- 2.
Available from s-east.ripple.com, and s-west.ripple.com.
- 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.
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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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