@inproceedings{ArmknechtKarameMandaletal.2015, author = {Frederik Armknecht and Ghassan O. Karame and Avikarsha Mandal and Franck Youssef and Erik Zenner}, title = {Ripple: Overview and Outlook}, series = {Trust and Trustworthy Computing : 8th International Conference, TRUST 2015}, volume = {LNCS 9229}, editor = {Mauro Conti and Matthias Schunter and Ioannis Askoxylakis}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Cham}, organization = {TRUST}, isbn = {978-3-319-22846-4 (eBook)}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-22846-4\_10}, pages = {163 -- 180}, year = {2015}, abstract = {Ripple is a payment system and a digital currency which evolved completely independently of Bitcoin. Although Ripple holds the second highest market cap after Bitcoin, there are surprisingly no studies which analyze the provisions of Ripple. In this paper, we study the current deployment of the Ripple payment system. For that purpose, we overview the Ripple protocol and outline its security and privacy provisions in relation to the Bitcoin system. We also discuss the consensus protocol of Ripple. Contrary to the statement of the Ripple designers, we show that the current choice of parameters does not prevent the occurrence of forks in the system. To remedy this problem, we give a necessary and sufficient condition to prevent any fork in the system. Finally, we analyze the current usage patterns and trade dynamics in Ripple by extracting information from the Ripple global ledger. As far as we are aware, this is the first contribution which sheds light on the current deployment of the Ripple system.}, language = {en} }