What is Ripple? Who are Ripple’s competitors?

Hello, my fellow steemians!

Today I found this really nice article on the web about ripple and its competitors.

What is Ripple?
Ripple is a distributed transaction ledger (Read: Blockchain) solution for cross-border money transfer. Ripple network is currency agnostic, i.e it is not dependent on a particular currency like Bitcoin, Litecoin etc. Although it has its own native currency called XRP, the end users, however, need not depend on the volatility of a particular currency like in Bitcoin. It uses probabilistic voting to confirm transactions.

On the Ripple’s DTL (distributed transaction ledger), a cross-asset matching is done. The usual currency exchange from $ to € will depend on the current exchange rate, however, in case of Ripple, the DTL using consensus algorithm, finds the best path for currency exchange, for eg - $ —-> £ —-> BTC —-> € or can be $ —-> ₹—-> € etc. etc. depending on the best path to reduce exchange rates.

Now that we have a slight idea (it's not that easy) what Ripple is about, we shall look for competitors for the same. Presently, there are very few competitors of ripple in the market.

List of Competitors

A.) Stellar
Stellar was a part of Ripple however, it is not anymore. In true sense, Stellar is the direct competitor of Ripple, it does that same pathfinding of best cross-asset combinations, but there are differences in the consensus also, how both are offered. You can read the difference between them @https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-main-difference-between-Stellar-and-Ripple-protocols

B.) PayCommerce
PayCommerce, 2006 founded, is a global ACH payment network provider. It competes directly with Earthport, both building a consortium of banks providing wholesale exchange rate and a local ACH solution across the border. However, in 2016, PayCommerce raised $22M from Tritium Capital to expand its payment settlement solution to blockchain - a proprietary blockchain called Federated Ledger, a hybrid of Centralized and Decentralized ledgers.

C.) Stream
The stream is a Seoul-based blockchain leveraging middleware and payment infrastructure provider. It has developed a real-time cross-border "value transfer pathfinder" of the Internet of Money, connecting disconnected financial networks, streamlining the Internet of Money. It raised $2M in Seed funding in 2015.

Some Indirect Competitors
! Currency Cloud
Currency Cloud is a white-label, remittance-as-a-service provider. It provides a payment engine, giving access through a dashboard to a channel for cross-border money transfer. It is primarily for businesses and provides liquidity solution for many other remittance companies.

! Bloom Solutions
A white-label blockchain-based payment solution that allows businesses to leverage blockchain as a settlement rail for cross-border money transfer. A very similar company is Hyphen