First published 21 April 2020; rewritten August 2026 after years of headlines that treated a lawsuit, a token, and a company as one object. They are related. They are not the same.
The company
Ripple (Ripple Labs) builds software aimed at moving value between financial institutions. It is a firm with staff, investors, and a communications team. It is not a protocol you run at home like Bitcoin.
The token
XRP is a digital asset on the XRP Ledger. You can hold it in a wallet that supports that ledger. Ripple the company did not need to sign your payment for it to confirm — which is the usual “but is it decentralised?” argument, and also not a complete picture, because the ledger’s validator set and Ripple’s large XRP holdings still matter to how people talk about control.
RippleNet
RippleNet was the brand for Ripple’s network of institutional customers. Marketing used to bundle xCurrent, xRapid, and xVia. Those product names have been reshuffled more than once. If a headline says “Ripple is replacing SWIFT”, read the sentence again: a vendor is selling rails to banks. Banks adopt vendors slowly, and they can stop.
Lawsuits are not a price oracle
From 2020 onward, US litigation between the SEC and Ripple dominated coverage. A court can decide whether a particular sale was a securities offering. That is not the same as deciding whether XRP is “a good investment”. We wrote about that confusion separately when the 2023 programmatic-sales ruling landed.
Hold XRP only if you understand the ledger and the custody. This page is a map of names, not a recommendation.
