Ripples Currency Giveaway Coming

Ripple appears set to launch at a more public level. Ripple is led by Jed McCaleb (founder of MtGox, eDonkey) and Chris Larsen (e-loan, Prosper.com). OpenCoin, the company overseeing Ripple, has already raised venture capital from firms led by the co-founders of PayPal and Netscape.



According to the Ripple web site, Ripple is a simple way for anyone in the world to send money to anyone else at practically no cost. Because Ripple is a single unified system that doesn’t require ACH, banks, or credit card networks, Ripple avoids many of the obstacles that drive other systems’ fees and hassles. Ripple also automatically exchanges currencies within the platform to make global payments easy.

Ripple avoids the costs, delays, and inconveniences of system-hopping by keeping everything within Ripple. Ripple never asks for personally identifiable information because it securely associates balances with accounts, but not personally identifiable account holders.

Ripple is fundamentally open. Like http:// for money, it’s an open protocol that allows the development of almost infinite transaction features. Anyone can build on top of it, the way anyone can use it.

So eventually there will be new ways that Ripple works.


Of note, Ripple contains a virtual currency, called ripples (XRP). These are used to pay the small fee required by the network for each transaction. They can also be sent between two accounts, converted into other currencies, or spent at venues that accept them.

The network was created with a fixed and finite number of ripples (100 billion). No more can ever be made.

Ripple just sent out this notice to those on its email list:

Upcoming: Ripples for Email List and Developers May 10, 2013

It has been quite a month for math-based currencies. There has been a flood of new interest so we have doubled our efforts to keep up with the rising tide. We are overdue with some important updates, but the time has come. Announcing.... At the end of May, we will begin a ripple (aka XRP) giveaway to everyone who signed up for our email list on or before May 9, 2013.  Tens of thousands of folks will be getting ripples!  We will be sending emails for this ripple giveaway in batches.  Everyone who is eligible will receive their giveaway email by the end of the month. Thereafter, we will start a Developer XRP Giveaway. This giveaway will be designed specifically for software developers with the goal of introducing the Ripple protocol to them. If you are a coder interested in our developer programs, we recommend you subscribe to our developer email list and follow us on Github. If you have more questions or want to chat with us, you can always find us in the Ripple forum or on Twitter. Thanks!

I am not sure what will come of all this but it should be monitored.