Ripple is a goofy business. For more than a decade now, the company has held vast quantities of magic beans known as XRP, which it dumps onto the market at regular intervals. It’s not clear why anyone needs these magic beans, but people buy them anyway, and that has made Ripple very rich—so rich that this week it casually spent $1 billion to buy a treasury management company called GTreasury. The question is how much longer Ripple can keep its magic bean factory humming.
Before looking closer at Ripple’s future prospects, though, it’s helpful to know a little more about one of the crypto industry’s oldest—and oddest—companies. The firm opened up shop in 2012 as something called OpenCoin. The company soon after created XRP, which stood out from other early cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin. Instead of creating a mining system to dribble new tokens out slowly, XRP’s creators just waved a wand and created the whole supply at once—100 billion of them to be exact.
