Ripple open source distributed payment system

Ripple Open Source Blockchain Platform

Build Financial Infrastructure Using Decentralized Ledger

Ripple is an open source decentralized financial technology for cross border payments. It is cryptographically secure and built on top of Interledger Protocol.

Ripple is an open source digital currency and payment solution. It provides ways for the fast and secured transaction of payment within its network. There are three roles that a Ripple node can take. Firstly, it can act as a normal user who transfers or receives payments. Secondly, the market maker can be a trade enabler in the system. Thirdly, the validating server usually validates transactions and runs a consensus protocol.

It is an open source distributed payment system is based on the XRP ledger that is a decentralized cryptographic ledger and it is powered by servers that are connected peer to peer. Consensus protocol which runs over the validating servers is an asynchronous round-based protocol. However, it has three phases the collection phase, consensus phase, and ledger closing phase.

Moreover, the security of Ripple depends upon ECDSA signatures. In addition, this digital financial technology is fast as there is a quick transaction validation mechanism in Ripple’s network. It is an open network so all the transactions are publicly available.

This open source decentralized platform is written in C++, Objective C, and a little input of some other languages. Further, anyone can deploy the instance of this distributed payment system. It has 0% failure as mentioned in their documentation.

System Requirements

Requirements to set up Ripple include:

Xcode
Git
Homebrew
Boost 1.70.0 or higher

Features

Ripple offers the following key features:

Open Source
Fewer Transaction Fees
Robust
Secured With Cryptography
XRP Ledger Based
Highly Centralized
Public Network
Fast transactions

Installation Instructions

Once all the prerequisites are installed, extract the Boost into a folder, note the location, and run the following command to ensure that your BOOST_ROOT environment points to the directory created by the Boost installation:

cd /LOCATION/OF/YOUR/BOOST/DIRECTORY
./bootstrap.sh
./b2 cxxflags="-std=c++14"

Then, edit below code with your Boost directory location and run to add Boost environment variable to your .bash_profile file so it's automatically set when you log in.

echo "export BOOST_ROOT=/Users/my_user/boost_1_71_0" >> ~/.bash_profile

If you updated your .bash_profile file in the previous step, be sure to source it in a new Terminal window. For example:

source .bash_profile

After that, run the following command to clone the app

git clone This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.:ripple/rippled.git

For the latest stable release, use the master branch.

cd rippled
git checkout master

Now, in the root directory, run the following commands:

mkdir my_build
cd my_build

Now, generate the build by running the following comands:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..

Then, run the build using CMake. This could take about 10 minutes

cmake --build . -- -j 4

rippled requires the rippled.cfg config file to run. You can find an example config file, rippled-example.cfg in rippled/cfg. Make a copy and save it as rippled.cfg in a location that enables you to run rippled as a non-root user. Access the rippled directory and run:

mkdir -p $HOME/.config/ripple
cp cfg/rippled-example.cfg $HOME/.config/ripple/rippled.cfg

Edit rippled.cfg to set necessary file paths. The user you plan to run rippled as must have write permissions to all of the paths you specify here.

Set the [node_db], [database_path] and [debug_logfile]

Rippled requires the validators.txt file to run. You can find an example validators file, validators-example.txt, in rippled/cfg/. Make a copy and save it as validators.txt in the same folder as your rippled.cfg file. Access the rippled directory and run:

cp cfg/validators-example.txt $HOME/.config/ripple/validators.txt

Finally, access your build directory and start the rippled with the following command:

 ./rippled

Explore

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