Ripple is the catchall name for the cryptocurrency platform, the transactional protocol for which is actually XRP, in the same fashion as Ethereum is the name for the platform that facilitates trades in Ether. Like other cryptocurrencies, Ripple is built atop the idea of a distributed ledger network which requires various parties to participate in validating transactions, rather than any singular centralized authority. That facilitates transactions all over the world, and transfer fees are far cheaper than the likes of bitcoin. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, XRP transfers are effectively immediate, requiring no typical confirmation time. Ripple was originally founded by a single company, Ripple Labs, and continues to be backed by it, rather than the larger network of developers that continue bitcoin’s development. It also doesn’t have a fluctuating amount of its currency in existence. Where bitcoin has a continually growing pool with an eventual maximum, and Ethereum theoretically has no limit, Ripple was created with all of its 100 billion XRP tokens right out of the gate. That number is maintained with no mining and most of the tokens are owned and held by Ripple Labs itself — around 60 billion at the latest count. Even at the recently reduced value of around half a dollar per XRP, that means Ripple Labs is currently sitting on around $20 billion worth of the cryptocurrency (note: Ripple’s price crashed hard recently, and may be worth far less than $60 billion by time you read this). It holds 55 billion XRP in an escrow account, which allows it to sell up to a billion per month if it so chooses in order to fund new projects and acquisitions. Selling such an amount would likely have a drastic effect on the cryptocurrency’s value, and isn’t something Ripple Labs plans to do anytime soon. In actuality, Ripple Labs is looking to leverage the technology behind XRP to allow for faster banking transactions around the world. While Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are built on the idea of separating financial transactions from the financial organizations of traditional currencies, Ripple is almost the opposite in every sense. XRP by Ripple price can be found on this page alongside the market capitalization and additional stats.
Zen is a decentralized financial platform, built from scratch with the goal of providing people with a secure, scalable and useful infrastructure for creating their own financial instruments, and trading them directly without intermediaries.The Zen blockchain is secured by multiple proof-of-work algorithms, with token-holder voting on the balance between them. Multi-hash mining creates robust incentives for miners to deliver efficient, reliable security.Zen smart contracts are written and secured by a subset of the F* functional programming language, allowing users to: A) Prove the amount of resources a contract will consume and provide the necessary fees for running the contract to miners, removing the need for a “gas” based system.B) Prove their contracts meet a given specification, meaning they can prove the contract will definitely do (or not do) something given a specific set of parameters.The Zen platform comes with a built-in solution for oracles, which provide contracts with useful real world data.Finally, Zen is integrated with the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing contracts to observe and respond to native bitcoin transactions