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Ripple has some serious issues, for instance the company and founders still holding over half of the total coins, and they have the ability to freeze the network or an individual account. Ripple isn't fully decentralized; parts of it are firmly under control of Ripple Labs.

Many banks have used Ripple, but in most cases the purpose was to experiment, with Ripple being a convenient mechanism to manage transactions and settlement outside of the banks' own bloated and antiquated systems which lend themselves poorly to experimentation.

I wonder how that affects Ripple who has offices in Mumai.

So Ripple, then?

https://ripple.com/

Ripple does have a coin, but it's used as 'grease' to help out the transactions. You can transact on the ripple network without the coins being involved at all.

IBM is playing catch-up with Ripple: https://ripple.com/ . Their distributed ledger has been available for a while now, and a number of banks already use it. They have some pretty charts over here: https://charts.ripple.com/#/ , but I don't think they have much to do with the Banking technology side.

IBM is playing catch-up with Ripple: https://ripple.com/ . Their distributed ledger has been available for a while now, and a number of banks already use it. They have some pretty charts over here: https://charts.ripple.com/#/ , but I don't think they have much to do with the Banking technology side.

It would be interesting, if somehow the exchange functionality were built into the protocol and entirely P2P. Getting rid of these centralized exchanges seems like it would really stabilize the currency. I don't know how remotely feasible that would be, it is far too early in the morning without coffee.

Effectively, what you describe is the protocol(which is p2p as well), except that the protocol does not address the issue of matching prospective buyers and prospective sellers (a protocol that does this, without a central market-operator, would be neat; but bodging one into a protocol for transferring virtual coins without double-spending would probably be unwieldy, though clients that implement both would be logical).

Uhm... isn't Ripple supposed to be that decentralized exchange?

Pretty much this. After Bitcoin, it was inevitable that copycats would come about. But a cryptocurrency with only redditors who actually believe in its worth, and 4channers scamming each other as the user base? Come on. This is not news for nerds. This does not matter.

As an aside, Ripple may actually be promising. If cryptocurrency is going to keep being a "thing", there ought to be more than one further down the line.

Current fork was not a big deal, it's an extraordinary branching but the protocol is very resilient to that. The chain recovered in a few hours and the transactions were automatically merged.

However, there have been many parallel systems almost since the beginning of Bitcoin: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_alternative_cryptocurrencies

What keeps Bitcoin on the top has always been the network effect. As long as there isn't a completely incompatible breakthrough in the technology, it is likely that it will remain dominant, since it can absorb development done on the alternatives. There hasn't been any such proven improvement yet though.

Also, check out Ripple: https://ripple.com/