About Ripple
Ripple connects banks, payment providers and digital asset exchanges via RippleNet to provide one frictionless experience to send money globally. Banks and payment providers can use the digital asset XRP to further reduce their costs and access new markets. XRP is the fastest and most scalable digital asset today.
Ripple is infrastructure technology that empowers financial institutions to make real-time, cross-border transactions for their customers. Ripple’s distributed tools and global network enable speed, certainty and reach at a lower settlement cost than previously possible. The Federal Reserve System is reviewing faster payment strategies for the U.S., including Ripple for greater interoperability.
How to Buy Ripple in the US
Quick reference instructions, followed by more detailed instructions and screenshots below.
- Open an account on Coinbase.
- Open an account on Binance.
- Buy Ethereum ETH on Coinbase. ETH has a lower exchange and conversion fee and is faster than Bitcoin.
- Fund your Binance account with the Ethereum you just purchased. Note: Coinbase will charge a $14.25 transfer fee, so make sure you purchase and send enough to make it worth it. I recommend at least $500 at a time.
- Open the Exchange page on Binance and trade as you will.
The reason you must fund Coinbase first is the company accepts FIAT currencies, i.e USD, EUR, etc. From there, you can take your FIAT converted to ETH and purchase Ripple, or any other coin at Binance.
These two companies are the most reputable I have currently encountered and used. Fees are reasonable compared to other options I’ve tried.
Fee roundup:
Coinbase: $14.25 to transfer to Binance
Binance: 0.1% trading fee.
Binance: Free to withdraw from Binance back to Coinbase.
Coinbase to Bank Account ACH: Free.
Total estimated fees on a $500 investment based on January 2018 rates: $19.25
Binance
Open an account in Binance.
Verify as necessary. The further verifications provided, the more you can deposit and withdraw at a time.
Click over to Funds, then Deposits and Withdrawals. You will be presented with a screen showing all of the available cryptocurrencies.
Click on Deposit for Ethereum.
You will be presented with an address to send your Ethereum to as a deposit. Copy the one time use address from Binance and paste it into the Coinbase accounts page under the Send button. The screenshot below shows BTC, but you will want to click on ETH.
Once the fund have finished transferring, head over to the Binance exchange.
Binance allows you to set limit, market, and stop-limit orders on buying and selling.
You are on your own from here. Good luck! To withdraw from Binance, go back to the Funds Deposits and Withdrawals page and click on the Withdrawal button for whatever currency you have.
Step by Step Instructions for using Binance
Now that your Ethereum has been successfully added, you can click Funds, then Deposits Withdrawals. Right in front of the coin you transferred, the total balance should reflect the value of Bitcoin or Ethereum you transferred.
- Click on Exchange, right beside the Binance Logo, then select the Basic option.
- On the Exchange page, look to the top right corner where you find the market pairs section above Trade History.
- Look for the market pair you want to exchange. In this case, locate the XRP/ETH pair and click (search for XRP/BTC if you funded your account with Bitcoin).
- The page loads the XRP/ETH pair, and you are set to exchange your coins for XRP.
- Beneath the chart, locate Buy XRP section.
- The first box shows the value of ETH per XRP to be purchased.
- The second box is for you to enter the amount (number of coins) of XRP you want to exchange for your BTC or ETH you funded.
- Below the Amount box, you have options to use 25%, 50%, 75%, or all of your deposited funds to buy the XRP cryptocurrency.
- The total box shows you how much BTC or ETH you are paying to buy the quantity of XRP you entered.
- Click the Buy XRP button.
Within some few seconds, you should have the XRP you have exchanged credited to your XRP wallet on the Binance platform.
Your XRP cryptocurrency is now available to be sent out to your wallet outside the exchange.
Is Ripple XRB a Good Cryptocurrency Investment?
There’s a business that Ripple has providing transaction processing software to banks. It can work without XRP and without any blockchain tech. It improves international payments because it uses end-to-end messaging to track payment progress, ensure all necessary compliance information is in the transaction in the first place, precisely knows the fees ahead of time, and provides prompt, reliable confirmation of delivery. This is a big enough improvement that banks will use it even if the actual money moves the same way it does now.
Ripple has built a public blockchain with a native asset. It has various nice features — a distributed exchange, good governance, fast transactions, high transaction volume, native multisign, key rotation, payment channels, and so on.
The hard part about getting banks to use a blockchain isn’t the blockchain, it’s everything else. It’s governance, compliance, integration with banking systems, and so on. our software does all that stuff, so if routing a payment through XRP is a penny cheaper, the bank can take it. Then we have to make XRP cheaper somewhere that matters.
We don’t target the biggest corridors like USD->EUR because they’re efficient. We target an inefficient, but fairly high volume, corridor. For example, EUR->INR. Market makers have very small profit margins, so even a small incentive to place good EUR<->XRP and XRP<->INR offers can beat what banks are getting now through the correspondent banking system.
Once we get one corridor, we hang other countries off each end of the corridor, expanding the reach of XRP.
Now, say you’re a company like Seagate that pays out money all over the globe. If you have to make payments to five countries in our corridors, you’d rather hold one pile of XRP than five piles of different currencies. That increases demand.
Now, say you’re a company like Apple with a huge pile of cash. If you want to snap up other assets cheap, you’ll need to hold the asset the people selling want. If they’re going into any of our corridors, they’ll want XRP, so you would want to hold it.
If that succeeds, it should massively increase the price of XRP.
Ripple holds a huge pile of XRP and will be the dominant XRP holder for the foreseeable future. We’re VC financed and we get revenue from selling software to banks. We don’t use our XRP as a bank account but as a strategic weapon. (Though we do sell some for revenue, we just don’t need to for salaries or to keep the lights on.)
Anyone who gets XRP from us as part of some deal with a lockup has their incentives aligned with ours. They want the long-term price of XRP to go up too.
That gives kind of the high-level picture. As for why XRP would thrive in that environment:
The use case Ripple is targeting is settling international payments, particularly in payment corridors that are not the very most popular.
The idea is this: Someone wants to make a payment from Singapore to Thailand. To provide cleared funds immediately, we need to give the recipient ownership of funds that are already in Thailand, right where the recipient needs them. And, again to complete the payment immediately, we need someone to take ownership of the Singapore funds and provide the asset we use to buy the funds in Thailand.
We could do this directly, but that would mean that the payment could only be facilitated by someone who both had funds in Thailand and was willing to accept funds in Singapore. That might not be all that many people, and they might charge a lot because the market is narrow.
Enter XRP. You can have a robust market of people willing to pay XRP to get funds in Singapore. And you can have a robust market of people willing to provide funds in Thailand in exchange for XRP. Now, to make that payment, you trade on two efficient markets instead of one inefficient one.
Why XRP? Because XRP transactions can be final in just a few seconds, XRP transactions have low cost, and Ripple has put a lot of effort into optimizing XRP for this exact use case. Most importantly, Ripple is tremendously dedicated to making XRP work for this use case, and has a war chest with a notional value in the billions that it can use to make it happen.