Meanwhile, major companies are jumping on the bandwagon: Tesla announced earlier this year that customers may buy vehicles with bitcoin.
That’s a key difference between bitcoin and traditional fiat currencies like the US dollar or the euro, which are controlled by central banks.
It’s also prone to wild swings in value, so it may not the best option for risk-averse investors.
Not all of the coins are in circulation, and bitcoin “miners” use computers to solve complex puzzles to create a new “block” on the chain.
Ether supply isn’t capped and new tokens are created constantly through a similar mining process as with bitcoin.
That means users can pay someone in bitcoin without owning bitcoin, simply by using XRP as the bridge between the currency they own and the one their recipient wants to be paid in.
XRP also doesn’t run on the blockchain but on a data structure called HashTree, which makes it different from other digital currencies.
Despite the finite supply, the unit cost per XRP token is still pretty low, with its all-time high at $3.40, according to CoinDesk data.
When it was first created in 2014, the value of each token was set at $1.
The digital currency’s popularity and value soared over the past year as bitcoin’s value climbed and Tesla CEO Elon Musk repeatedly tweeted about it.