Digital currencies offer traders the rare opportunity to gain access to an emerging asset class based on revolutionary technology. However, it’s essential to make informed decisions about the specific digital currencies in which you transact.
In this post, we’ll look at two of the longest-established and most high-profile digital assets in the space: XRP and Ethereum Classic.
What You Need to Know about XRP
The digital asset that powers the Ripple ecosystem, XRP, is designed to offer banks and other financial institutions the liquidity necessary to facilitate fast and reliable cross-border payments. In other words, banks and other financial institutions use XRP to transact and settle payments from country to country. Additionally, XRP can also serve as a bridge currency.
Speed is the primary reason why XRP makes this possible. Unlike other blockchain-based currencies that can take up to 30 minutes to confirm a transaction, XRP highly scalable, and fast, capable of handling roughly 1,500 transactions per second.
Ripple has partnered with a long list of banks, and its XRapid technology (powered by XRP) has been put into full commercial-scale use by several of these institutions. Overall, Ripple is one of leading projects in the digital currency space in terms of enterprise adoption.
Though the use of XRP and XRapid in the banking industry is still limited and in its early stages, XRP has the potential to see much greater adoption in the years ahead, should early reports of its utility prove favorable in the years ahead.
What You Need to Know about Ethereum Classic
Many new to cryptocurrency believe that Ethereum Classic is a “hard fork” of Ethereum, the popular smart contract platform. Hard forks are essentially new and distinct versions of existing blockchains based on changes to the underlying technology.
The reverse, however, is true: Ethereum Classic is the original blockchain, and Ethereum is the newer project based on the original protocol.
The divergence occurred in 2016, after a security exploit resulted in 3.6 million Ether tokens being transferred between accounts without owner consent. The Ethereum community was split on how to address the situation; some favored making changes to the underlying code to roll back the actions and compensate holders, while others maintained that the immutability (or unchangeability) of the blockchain was paramount, and the results of the exploit should stand.
Ultimately, the majority voted in favor of restoring the lost Ether by creating a new hard fork — the project today known as “Ethereum.” Meanwhile, the original chain was rechristened “Ethereum Classic.”
As you might expect, both projects share a lot in common. Ethereum Classic allows people to transmit value to each other via tokens while also enabling the use of autonomous smart contracts. The platform can be used to create decentralized applications (or Dapps), which are essentially software applications built on blockchains. By doing this, developers can take advantage of the trustless nature of decentralized networks.
Today, Ethereum Classic remains one of the busiest blockchains in terms of network activity, and has several development teams working to build out and refine the technology.
Where to Purchase XRP
Choosing the right crypto trading platform is a critical part of trading. If you’re in Canada and looking for a trusted cryptocurrency platform to buy XRP, Bitvo is for you.
