"Not-So-Decentralized" Ripple Freezes $1m in User Funds

The Ripple payment network is facing criticism this week over revelations about the liquidity of some of its assets. It’s come to light that Ripple gateways — the onramps and offramps of the network — have the ability to “freeze” user funds at will. Furthermore, Ripple Labs has already used its influence to convince Bitstamp, a prominent gateway and exchange, to freeze $1 million worth of funds belonging to Ripple’s departed founder Jed McCaleb. Ripple “gateways” act as trusted entry and exit points for the payment network, providing users with specialized institutions for converting....


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Ripple Directs Bitstamp to Freeze Funds of Former Co-Founder Jed McCaleb

Ripple, the so-called decentralized payment network, has frozen funds worth more than US$1 million that belong to the company’s former co-founder Jed McCaleb. Since their initial launch, Ripple has represented themselves to the public as a payment network of “decentralized” gateways that convert different assets or types of payments—such as bitcoin or Paypal—into IOUs tradeable in the Ripple network. On August 1, 2014, Ripple introduced a feature called “Balance Freeze” which allowed the network’s gateways to freeze and prevent funds from being traded, an action that they claimed was....

Ripple: Getting Started Guide

By now, you may have already heard of Ripple, the new decentralized cryptocurrency project that has been making waves (pun intended) in the Bitcoin community. While Bitcoin allows anyone to hold, send and receive bitcoins over a decentralized network to and from anywhere in the world with extremely low fees, Ripple seeks to allow anyone to do the same thing with any other currency as well. In order to get started with Ripple, you will first need to open a Ripple wallet. Just like Bitcoin in 2009, there is currently only one Ripple client available, the official one at ripple.com, although....

Ripple CTO Hints at XRP Ledger Upgrades to Enable an NFT Strategy

Ripple CTO David Schwartz said the firm is currently working on a non-fungible token (NFT) strategy. He added that based on observations, people care little about the underlying technology, only the NFT itself and the user experience. “Ripple is currently working on an NFT strategy. I think the key element here is the user experience, […]

10 things you need to know about Ripple

1. What is Ripple? Ripple is the name for both a digital currency (XRP) and an open payment network within which that currency is transferred. It is a distributed, open-source payments system that's still in beta. The goal of the ripple system, according to its website, is to enable people to break free of the "walled gardens" of financial networks - ie, credit cards, banks, PayPal and other institutions that restrict access with fees, charges for currency exchanges and processing delays. 2. What does Ripple do? According to is OpenCoin, the company behind ripple, the currency addresses....

Failed Ripple tfPartialPayment Implementation Causes Gox-Style Hack at Justcoin Exchange

tfPartialPayment is the name of a new Ripple vulnerability. Earlier, a user of the Justcoin digital currency exchange reported on XRPtalk this morning they had received an email alerting them of a hack. On October 8th, An unknown third party had exploited a network-wide weakness in the way Ripple and Stellar communicated transactions to drain the exchange's hotwallets. Luckily, the majority of customer funds were kept in cold storage. None-the-less the exchange chose to halt all services for the past three days to avoid operating as a fractional reserve. The purpose of the email was to....