How are Stellar and Ripple different?

TheReason

Do they solve the same problem?

Are they "competing" head to head?

Can both survive in the long run or one should prevail?

Thanks for clarifying... :slight_smile:

Claudio

Stellar was founded in early 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim. Initially, Stellar used the Ripple protocol. A fork in Stellar network prompted SDF to take steps to build a new consensus protocol, which resulted in the SCP. SDF claimed the fork resulted from a flaw in the Ripple protocol. Ripple maintains that its consensus network is not vulnerable to the issue encountered by Stellar. The Stellar Development Foundation with the help of Stanford University Professor DAVID MAZIERES then created an updated version of the protocol with a new consensus algorithm called federated Byzantine agreement (FBA), based on entirely new code. The code and whitepaper for this new algorithm were released in April 2015, and the upgraded network went live in November 2015. You can find all at: https://galactictalk.org/d/242-difference-between-ripple-and-stellar

TheReason

Thanks Claudio.

That seems to highlight technical differences. I'm wondering more about the "use cases" or business side of project. As per original post:

[quote="TheReason, post:1, topic:255, full:false"] Do they solve the same problem? Are they "competing" head to head? Can both survive in the long run or one should prevail?[/quote]

b3no

It's really hard to compare them. They are somehow overlapping, but Stellar has a better consensus protocol and it allows the technology to be open. To join ripple you need to sign some papers and get approved, but with stellar anyone can join. I think that this significantly lowers the entry barrier.

With Lightyear.io stellar is also trying to get "heavier" enterprise clients. I can clearly see what Stellar is doing and what they are trying to be (crypto cheap SWIFT), with ripple it's more complicated. I don't think there is a place for ripple. The clients that Ripple has right now are not using them to solve real problems, just experimenting. But with stellar you can actually go to an anchor give them money and get it on the network. And soon Stellar will overpass Ripple with their client number.

Of course nothing of this means that the price of Lumens (XLM) is going to overpass XRP. It's still crypto and prices are just made up and manipulated.

PeterMore

So basically the infrastructure and software that should be used by XLM is already working and ready?

b3no

Yes, it was working years ago. Many companies use Stellar already:

https://www.stellar.org/about/directory#companies

strawberry_pancakes

I think Ripple has liquidity providers and messaging infrastructure built into its network, too.