Watch the actual volume numbers on coinmarketcap, and you will see that Ripple's daily volume is nearly always in the top 10 and frequently in the top five. That hardly counts as "barely anyone." In addition, the XRP volume number does not count the non-XRP to non-XRP asset trades that occur on Ripple, so a lot of activity is missed by it.

Litecoin does indeed have a bigger volume than Ripple, but the multiplier from Ripple volume to Litecoin volume is typically much smaller than the multiplier between Litecoin volume and Bitcoin volume. If you use the multiplier to discount Ripple, you are doing Litecoin an even bigger disservice with regard to the same thing versus Bitcoin.   

Ripple Labs has updated the XRP distribution page at https://www.ripplelabs.com/xrp-distribution

The totals as of July 31, 2014 are 71,010,747,718 XRP still held by Ripple Labs and 29,989,252,282 XRP are held by others. Please adjust the available supply of XRP used by coinmarketcap to reflect the updated distribution information.

There are also several Chinese-only forums, but since I don't read Chinese, the only one I have noticed is RippleSky.com. Taking a quick look at RippleSky, there is an extensive report from a Ripple Meetup where Ripple users in your own city of Shanghai got together.

China has a lot of interest in Ripple, with several CNY gateways: The major two are RippleChina (site, chart) and rippleCN (site, chart). If you attract customers making CNY deposits, they will likely deposit from either Ripple China or rippleCN, although RippleFox (site, chart) started less than a month ago and is growing.

You may want to reach out to existing Ripple users. The highest concentrations can be found on the official Ripple forum and on XRPTalk.

LakeBTC's Ripple experiment is already being discussed in both places:

• Ripple forum thread
• XRPTalk thread 

Additionally, both of those forums have dedicated Chinese language subforums:

• Ripple forum Chinese subforum
• XRPTalk Chinese subforum

Have you looked at the Ripple Gateway Framework as a possible integration point if you automate your Ripple deposits and withdrawals?

If you contact partners@ripple.com, they may be able to get you set up with an Amazon EC2 AMI of a pre-installed deployment to use for experimentation. If not, you can just download it and set it up yourself. The Gateway Framework is still under active development, but if you do not expect to automate Ripple immediately, its release schedule may line up with yours.

It could save you some time, hassle and implementation costs.   

Yes. Why not take a look at the PeerFinder Readme in the the Ripple source code (open source)? After digesting the overview contained in the Readme, take a look at the actual code for the PeerFinder and Overlay network implementations to see the nitty-gritty.

Fidor is now on record saying that they use Ripple[1]. Since Kraken uses Fidor heavily and plans to eventually become a Ripple gateway, what implications does Fidor's Ripple use have for Kraken? Are there any near term changes planned?

[1] http://www.coindesk.com/fidor-becomes-first-bank-to-use-ripple-payment-protocol/

Even that number may be seriously underreporting Ripple's volume. If you look at the source for totalValueSent in the data API, you see that it only checks the volume on five currencies:


Not only does this volume report omit many currencies with non trivial volume, these five currencies are no longer all in the top five every day. Ripple Trade Japan JPY in particular has been muscling into the top five on occasion during the last week or two, but it doesn't show up in the reported volume.

Basically, until the API is updated with a broader selection of gateways, treat any Ripple volume numbers as absolute lower bounds.

When Kraken starts issuing on Ripple, will it issue under the currency codes used on Kraken or those that are prevalent on Ripple? Kraken uses XBT for bitcoin, but every other Bitcoin issuer on Ripple uses BTC.

This has an impact on whether or not users can allow rippling through their account between other Bitcoin issues and Kraken's Bitcoin issue. If Kraken chooses to use BTC, then Kraken's issue will be inconsistent with their on-exchange code, but it will make Kraken's in-Ripple issuance more liquid since since it can participate in rippling with Bitcoin issues from other gateways.

Besides the people who allow rippling on a 1:1 basis, simply because they trust both issuers equally, it seems likely that others would be interested in setting a small transit fee between Kraken's and other gateway's issues to get some compensation for providing liquidity (setting a transit fee on letting the pathfinding algorithm swap out different issuers' currency is lower maintenance than putting offers up on the order book, because when you use the transit fee, you don't have to keep putting up offers as they are consumed. One simply makes the desired percentage as volume sloshes back and forth between different gateways).

Having that liquidity for your customers will become more important as merchants increasingly start accepting Ripple payments, since it can lower the amounts your customers pay when the merchants want non-Kraken currencies. It is just something to consider as Kraken builds out Ripple integration.

 

Any word on when Kraken will go live with Ripple gateway functionality? Is progress being made, or is that project still queued behind other items?

The exact command I use to attach is below. I cut and pasted it and only truncated my account key, so yours will be longer:

boinccmd --project_attach http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org  866848_1b

Based on your post, it should be working.

Once Kraken activates their Ripple integration, you should be able to covert USD.kraken into USD.bitstamp within Ripple. The last status update on this was that February would be the very earliest we could expect Ripple integration.

Dargo, has there been any update to the timeline?

Of course, after Kraken starts issuing within Ripple, you might have to wait a short time for the order books to form. However, since both Bitstamp and Kraken are solid exchanges, it is reasonable that the exchange ratio should be close to parity.

Having a good NXT/XRP order book makes it more likely that people can find a good conversion path when paying in NXT to a recipient desiring some other arbitrary currency. XRP is the most highly traded bridge currency on Ripple, and having fewer hops when sending payments at market rate is a good thing.

Don't forget that you can spend your NXT via the bitcoin bridge simply by entering a bitcoin address as the recipient on the send page. You then just select the currency that you want to pay with (NXT) and a few seconds later the BTC will get transferred on the blockchain.

It looks like the Ripple volume is only based on XRP traded against BTC.Bitstamp. There are several other pairs with comparable volume, so XRP seems to be underreported by coinmarketcap (BTC.Bitstamp often has less volume than USD.Bitstamp and CNY.RippleCN).

https://ripplecharts.com/markets shows most of the markets. Several more markets, like XRP/NXT, have developed since ripplecharts.com stopped being updated while v2 of the site is being developed, but the biggest markets are on there.

BTW: Thanks for adding XRP back to the main page!

I don't know whether Ripple Labs actually supplied gateway code or if each gateway rolled their own using the API. If a gateway has low volume, everything can be done manually from the client until their usage pushes them to automate it.

Regardless, Justcoin has released their gateway code as open source:

https://github.com/justcoin/snow

As written, it has interfaces for XRP, BTC, LTC and fiat banking. It is a good place to start if you want to integrate additional altcoins. They are just starting a documentation project to make that easier.

It is actually easy to trade XRP, but since all of the trading is done within Ripple's distributed exchange (with the exception of on Kraken), it isn't very visible to the outside world.

I am quite fond of using Ripple's Bitcoin bridge to spend currencies I hold within Ripple anywhere that accepts bitcoin. All I have to do is enter the BTC amount and recipient's Bitcoin address within the Ripple client and then pick the currency I want to pay with. Ripple automatically performs the trade and sends bitcoin to the recipient's Bitcoin wallet. What could be easier?

If you broadly define mining as "exchanging computing power for coins," you can "mine" Ripple's XRP as well. However, instead of just hashing to secure a blockchain, your computing power is assisting scientific research to fight AIDS and Cancer.

Visit www.ComputingForGood.org to get started. Note: you have to either earn or acquire the account reserve of 20 XRP before any will show up in your wallet from the giveaway. That first lump deposit might take a few days if you have a run of the mill computer, but after you clear the account reserve you should get a daily XRP payout.

This is why the planned Ripple integration is so nice. If a coin has liquidity within Ripple, it can be effortlessly spent at any merchant that accepts either Ripple payments *or* bitcoin.

For example, if you are buying on Gyft, you select the option to pay with bitcoin. Then you enter the BTC payment amount and the supplied bitcoin address as the recipient from within your Ripple client. Ripple then calculates a conversion path and tells you how much IXC it will cost. If you elect to spend that IXC, a few seconds later the Gyft checkout dialog will register receipt of the requested bitcoin, and you have your Gyft card. The process is just as easy at any merchant who accepts bitcoin.

Under the covers, Ripple trades your IXC for BTC.bitstamp, which is then redeemed at Bitstamp's Ripple->Bitcoin bridge. Bitstamp then sends that amount of BTC to the address entered in to the Ripple client. The user doesn't have to worry with any of that, however, they just enter the final payment details and select the currency to pay with.

---

James Lee (jl777) is serving as a market maker within Ripple for several crypto and fiat currencies. He has recently started offering market making services for additional altcoins. Since the iXcoin dev team is planning to integrate with Ripple, having a good market maker supporting IXC will be a plus. Send James a message.     

Ripple is not centralized. You can see this for yourself in the source code. Start with the PeerFinder code's Readme and go from there.

If you aren't a programmer, just peruse the PeerFinder Readme and skip the source. Just that little bit of exposure to Ripple's P2P plumbing should convince an open minded person that the system is not centralized.

I still have graphite in my left hand from when I stabbed myself with a pencil in first grade. However, I still use both pencils and my left hand as I find them both to be extremely useful.

Solution #1: If you want to see how much of each type of BTC you hold, go to the Trust tab in your Ripple client. It will not only show you the trust lines that you have open for each issuer and currency, but it will also show you how much of each type of currency you hold from them. While you have the Trust tab open, set TradeFortress's trust setting to 0.

Solution #2: If you really want to liquidate your stock of 4 TradeFortress BTC, I have just placed an offer on the order book giving 0.001 XRP per TradeFortress BTC. Go to the Trade tab, select the BTC/XRP dropdown and enter TradeFortress's address (rH3bZsvVUhzugvcYuJVoSYCEMHkfK6wHNv) as the BTC issuer. Then cross the trade. If you only hold TradeFortress BTC, you can skip the Trade tab entirely and just use the Convert tab.

This will allow you to clear out those worthless BTC and put this episode behind you. Then you can move on with your Ripple usage, knowing that you should only trust gateways worthy of your trust. Bitstamp is a good place to start.