Summary

Ripple positions itself more as a complement, rather than a competitor of Bitcoin. Ripple is a distributed network which means transactions occur immediately across the network - and as it is peer to peer - the network is resilient to systemic risk. Ripples are not mined, but for each transaction there is a small amount of XRP that is destroyed. This adds a deflationary measure into the system.

Swot analysis of Ripple

Strengths

• Ripple has turned the tables on financial activism by directly targeting banks and helping them to instantly and cheaply affect worldwide transfer of money.
• They have effectively force-fed an incentive that has slowly turned pro-establishment financial institutions to embrace blockchain technology by showing them a better way of doing what they do. Buying and holding XRP is an investment in and of itself in the long run since its traffic, (and hence demand) has been growing.
• Ripple confirms transactions in under 4 seconds, and it handles more than 10,000 transactions per second.

Weakness

• Ripple Labs holds 61.4 billion XRP in escrow
• Remaining tokens could be released which would have an inflationary effect
• Centralized

Opportunity

• Ripple could eventually revolutionize the entire global payment infrastructure
• Governments prefer centralized currencies

Threat

• Traditional legacy payment systems can build their own blockchain platforms
• Stellar Lumens is a big competitor
• Vulnerable to attack if important nodes are removed