Ripple (XRP) is upcoming Bitcoin like currency that doesn’t require a blockchain or mining. Ripple is also decentralized and based on peer to peer technology, just like Bitcoin. Ripple is backed by Opencoin, a startup building a simple, global, open currency system. Today, the company announced it has an angel round of funding of an undisclosed amount from Andreessen Horowitz, FF Angel, Lightspeed Venture Parnters, Vast Ventures and Bitcoin Opporunity Fund.

The founder of Mt. Gox, major bitcoin exchange, has built a team and they are working on a global, p2p currency exchange that is minerless with “instant” confirmations. The project will be open-source too. How could this be a bitcoin killer?

As you know Bitcoin transactions have a tendency to take a long time to confirm. OpenCoin wants to solve this problems by creating a unified ledger, which keeps track of every account, transaction and balance, which the system automatically pings to confirm the legitimacy of transaction, allowing them to clear in under a minute, the company says.

Ripple could be Bitcoin competitor too, As they say, Ripple network is a global system for making transactions of any kind: US dollars, yen, any other existing currency and Bitcoin. Yes! you heard it right, you could use  Ripples to buy Bitcoins or vice versa.

like Bitcoin, there is a known, finite number of ripples: The Ripple network contains 100 billion XRP, the majority of which will be distributed for free by OpenCoin Inc. Ripple is currently in beta though, so the model is largely untested. We’ll keep you posted as soon as we get any news  about development of Ripples.

/Via TechCrunch/

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