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Ripple Investment Guide Version 1.4 by Andrew White andrew@ripplehedgefund.com

Ripple Investment Guide Version 1.4 by Andrew White andrew@ripplehedgefund.com Welcome to the Ripple Investment Guide. This ebook is designed as an overview of the ways investors can participate in the Ripple ecosystem. This book is only for educational purposes, and is not intended to provide investment advice. Before investing, I encourage my readers to discuss with their financial advisor any potential risks and rewards of an investment. My goal for this book is to be largely non-technical and, as the author, I feel a certain responsibility to make sure everyone who reads this book learns something of value. If there is a passage in this guide that does not seem to make sense or is too complicated, my apologies and a request: please do not give up learning more about Ripple and the opportunities it presents to investors. Take your time with each section and supplement your learning with Google to help with your own research on terms or ideas of interest to you. Don’t be surprised if after reading this guide you become the “go to” expert about Ripple in your social network. The Ripple payment system is one of the most exciting technologies to be developed in recent years. For the first time, payments can be sent to anyone in the world in any currency within a few seconds. I describe Ripple as “like email for money.” Activities that were once the sole purview of the banking industry, such as lending or making payments, have become democratized in the Ripple system. The myriad opportunities and challenges these new options bring to the masses open a whole new set of possibilities and questions for the discerning investor to consider. This ebook presents a brief overview of business opportunities in the RIpple ecosystem and what roles you can play in this exciting new area of finance. I want to cover all the major components of Ripple as it exists today and dive deeper into each topic as space allows. With any new technology there are tradeoffs between sophistication and ease of use, new features and complications, new capabilities and new risks, and Ripple is no different. In this ebook’s dozen pages, my intent is make you conversant in the main areas of Ripple and invite you to specialize in your own area of research. Table of Contents Ripple Labs Wallets Ripples Gateways Consensus Currency IOUs Traders Market Makers Enterprises Due Diligence Questions In the Future FAQs Glossary About the Author Ripple Labs Ripple is spearheaded by the company named Ripple Labs, Inc. in San Francisco. Formed in 2013 by Jed McCaleb, Chris Larsen, and a few others, Ripple Labs owns the intellectual property of the Ripple protocol. The code and programs that make up Ripple are available for free for anyone to download, use and modify. Ripple Labs is supported by a community of Ripple enthusiasts around the world who are passionate about making the technology more useful. These people provide essential feedback to product teams, engineers, techies, and C-level executives leading the overall implementation of Ripple’s development. The known investors in Ripple Labs include Google Ventures, Andresson and Horowitz, Lightspeed Ventures, Bryan Bradford, and others. As of March 2014, Ripple Labs has a staff of 40 people led by CEO Chris Larsen. Mr. Larsen is the former CEO of ELoan and later Prosper.com, both of which were pioneering companies in peer to peer lending. As an outsider, I can’t say anything definitive about Ripple Labs’ business strategies. But their plan appears committed to increasing the value of the Ripple network. They do this through a variety of strategies to show the public and world of business that Ripple provides a better system for payments, better than the alternatives. One of the ways of accomplishing this is by making useful software and giving it away for free. The source code of the software from Ripple Labs can be read and used by programmers at no charge, which is an open invitation for curious engineers and programmers to make contributions to the code and expedite the development of the core functionality. This also provides a valuable safety mechanism. Since more eyes can look at the underlying code, potential issues can be identified and fixed early, before becoming a serious issue. Ripple Labs can give away the software for free because the core value proposition of Ripple is that an open payment network that anyone can use and improve is more valuable than a closed alternative. So far the plan seems to be working well and Ripple is starting to make big waves! Wallets To use a digital currency system, people start by creating a digital version of a wallet. A Ripple wallet is identified by its Ripple address that begins with the lower case ‘r’ and looks like this: r3CxMDQFX1Atq1vQN5sqVsjm3rawGSwd32 (note: donations to the author are welcome!). The wallet is always available on a web page with the main functionality displayed: wallet transaction history, an address book, a section to send and receive payments, and a section of the wallet for you to make currency trades. It is important to note that Ripple wallets are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which was created by the U.S. government to protect consumers from bank failures. For most consumers, the “magic” of Ripple payments happens when payments are sent across the network within a few seconds. To anyone accustomed to the slow and cumbersome process of traditional payment networks, this is an incredible advance in payments technology. No longer do people need to wait for days for a bank wire transfer to be completed, or weeks for a credit card payment to be processed; with Ripple, having to wait for payment processing is a thing of the past. Even in areas with modern banking systems (like Europe and China) with same day bank transfers, the existing payment system is still a relatively slow and costly process that creates an unnecessary drag on the economy. Just imagine what kind of lowcost new services will become available with Ripple to merchants, consumers, and investors across the entire global economy. As far as most investors are concerned, the Ripple wallet is also where “magic” happens in its role in redefining the payment experience around the world. To be honest, in my opinion, wallets are not all that interesting visually, or conceptually, nor should they be particularly interesting. They are designed to be as simple as possible hence there isn’t much to see or do in a Ripple wallet (with the exception of trading). Advanced concept warning! I like to describe Ripple wallets using the following example but it is not a precise analogy. I just mentioned that Ripple wallets are not FDIC insured because they are not issued by a U.S. chartered bank. Allow me artistic license with the following analogy: a Ripple wallet is kind of like a bank account but you as the wallet owner (account owner) are empowered to control how much money you trust to be held by your various bank like entities (gateways, more about them later). Ripple Wallets are great because when they can store or make payments in any currency. The author can’t think of any other wallet ever created that is able to accept any currency ever created, including government issued currencies and private currencies! For the first time in history, digital wallet users can hold any currency ever issued. This is a Big Idea that may take years to be widely understood, appreciated, and accepted by the market. Ripples Ripples are the native currency of the Ripple protocol. The protocol consists of the rules of how Ripple works and these rules are translated by professional programmers into software to perform all the functions that Ripple delivers. More generally, people make protocols to solve a problem in a consistent and entirely reliable manner. Well designed protocols tend to have many people using them and the best protocols have a long service life. For example, think of the protocol of shaking hands when greeting someone. This protocol has become instantly recognizable worldwide. It’s notable traits are that it is simple, easily reproducible, and cooperative in nature. The best computer protocols and monetary systems aim for similar results. To be compliant with international naming conventions, Ripples are known by a three letter acronym, comparable to how US dollars are represented as USD. The three letter code is XRP. Ripple was released with only 100 billion units of XRP to ever exist. The logic is that average consumers might only need to use a relatively few Ripples across their entire lifetime. The 100 billion number was judged to be large enough to be useful for the Ripple network for hundreds of years, and quantifiable enough to provide a business model for Ripple Labs. Ripples are distributed in a variety of ways. Ripple Labs sells bulk quantities for large orders and gives away smaller amounts for free. It is critical to the Ripple Labs business strategy that XRP be uploads/Geographie/ ripple-investment-guide.pdf