Ripple

Origins and early history

In 2011, engineers David Schwartz and Jed McCaleb began developing a financial infrastructure similar to bitcoin that would use substantially less energy and reduce transaction time. In September 2012, Chris Larsen and McCaleb co-founded NewCoin, which was renamed OpenCoin the following month.

On April 11, 2013, OpenCoin announced it had closed an angel round of funding with several venture capital firms. That same month, OpenCoin acquired SimpleHoney to help it popularize virtual currencies and make them easier for average users.

On September 26, 2013, OpenCoin officially changed its name to Ripple Labs, Inc. On October 6, 2015, the company was rebranded from Ripple Labs to Ripple.

Introduction of banking sector products and international expansion

In March 2018, a Japanese bank consortium led by SBI Ripple Asia, comprising 61 banks, launched "MoneyTap", a Ripple-powered mobile app to provide on-demand domestic payments in Japan. In May 2018, Spanish Banking group Santander released One Pay FX — the first mobile application for international payments powered by blockchain technology, that uses Ripple's xCurrent technology. XCurrent is not a blockchain or any form of distributed ledger. Ripple CTO David Schwartz described it as "bi-directional messaging" that can eventually plug into distributed ledgers. Following the creation of a Mumbai office, Ripple added multiple Indian customers in 2018, including leading banks such as Kotak Mahindra Bank, Axis Bank, and IndusInd, that announced that they started using Ripple's products. Ripple's CEO predicted that by end of 2018 "major banks" would be using Ripple tools that made use of the XRP cryptocurrency and that by end of 2019 "dozens" of banks would be using XRP. However, neither of those predictions came to pass in the specified time frame.