Ripple started in 2012 as a payment network for fast money transfers, including cross-border payments in multiple currencies. One of its primarily targeted market niches was an attempt to compete with SWIFT, banking on final settlement in seconds, regardless of the kind and size of payment,— and no chargebacks.

At present Ripple is a blockchain payment network based on its own original protocol, which was designed as a replacement to legacy payment and settlement system. It supports custom tokens and has its own fully on-chain decentralized exchange (DEX): users can create token exchange orders and other users can consume them in their transactions. Users can also create objects such as trust lines, cross-country payments and payment channels, which requires reserving XRP to create an object and burning XRP to send a transaction, thus giving XRP utility value.