Ripple Releases Interledger to Connect Banks and Blockchains

Ripple Labs shortened its name to Ripple this week, a move which according to company officials, signals its products are now "out of the lab" and ready for use.

Long one of the more well-funded startups in industry, Ripple was arguably the first to focus on use cases for distributed ledgers, introducing an alternative ledger that deviated from bitcoin's method for consensus and featured its own unique digital currency, XRP, as early as 2012.

Since then, Ripple has increasingly put forth in its public messaging that it is seeking to realize an "Internet of Value", a term that denotes a time when money could move as quickly as information does today. As a building block for this future, Ripple has introduced the Interledger protocol (ILP), which intends to act as an arbiter for all types of ledgers, both those that are distributed and traditional centralized alternatives.

Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas explained that ILP itself is not a ledger, as it does not seek consensus toward any state. Rather it provides a top-layer cryptographic escrow system that allows funds to move between ledgers with the help of intermediaries it calls "connectors".
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Further, ILP has no native token, so individual ledgers operating its protocol will still hold balances in their native units of account. Thomas contends such interoperability solves the issue of one specific payment network – be it Ripple or Visa – needing to reach global ubiquitousness.