$33 million XRP transaction cost a third of a cent

Yesterday, someone transferred 90,000,000 Ripple XRP tokens from one unknown address to another. Typically transfers of this magnitude are made to the wallet of an easily identifiable cryptocurrency exchange, but in this case the sender and recipient addresses are unknown, making the transaction even more suspicious.

Today it was announced that XRP has been admitted to listing on the popular trading platform eToro, a traditional trading system that now supports both fiat and cryptocurrency. It is possible that eToro purchased a large amount of XRP for liquidity, although the amount seems excessive even for a large exchange.

However, the more impressive aspect is the incredibly low transaction cost of just 0.005 XRP. The value of the total number of XRP tokens transferred is equivalent to $33 million, and the commission was a third of a cent. The same fiat transfer between traditional banks could easily incur a fee of over $1 million. Converting 90,000,000 XRP to fiat currency will undoubtedly incur additional fees, but the transaction demonstrates the potential that digital assets represent for the future of international money transfers.

 XRP is not a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain and does not require mining, so it has virtually zero fees. This means that while it does not suffer from the high costs associated with mining, it also does not enjoy the security and decentralization benefits that the PoW network offers.

This year, Ripple is actively working to partner with banks to improve cross-border payments and challenge traditional SWIFT system, which is used by most financial institutions. The ability to process 10,000 transactions per second certainly seems more attractive than the slow Bitcoin network. However, as long as Ripple Corporation controls more than 51 percent of the XRP supply, it will continue to be criticized by skeptics regarding its decentralization, one of the key aspects of the cryptocurrency.

According to cryptocoinspy.com