1e+006 2e+07

Total transactions
1.8e+07 Offer Create

Number of transactions
100000 1.6e+07 Offer Cancel
Number of ledgers Payments
1.4e+07
Account Set
10000 1.2e+07 Trust Set
1e+07 Set Regular Key
1000 8e+06
6e+06
100 4e+06
2e+06
10 0
0-10 11-20 21-30 31-40 02-03/13 11-12/13 03-04/13 07-08/14 01-02/15
Elapsed time since last ledger (seconds) Date

(a) Closure times of ledgers in Jan- (b) Evolution of the number of Ripple transac-
uary/February 2015. tions over time.

1.8e+06 1e+16
Ripple USD
1.6e+06 Bitcoin 1e+14 CNY
1.4e+06 Stellar JPY

Payments amounts
1e+12 EUR
1.2e+06 MXN
Payments

1e+06 1e+10
800000 1e+08
600000
1e+06
400000
200000 10000
0 100
02-03/13 11-12/13 03-04/14 07-08/14 01-02/15 02-03/13 11-12/13 03-04/14 07-08/14 01-02/15
Date Date

(c) Evolution of the number of XRP payments (d) Evolution of the trade of fiat currencies
and trade of digital currencies over time. over time.

Fig. 3. Characterization of the Ripple system in the period between January 2013 and January
2015.

performed very few transactions in the system. Notice that this does not necessarily
provide evidence that Ripple users are inactive; for example, privacy-aware users could
set up, in theory, different accounts for each transaction they perform in order to prevent
the leakage of their total balance in the system [11].

Ledger closing time: In Figure 3(a), we measure the time elapsed between the creation
of two successive ledgers in the time interval spanning across January and February
2015. Our results show that indeed most ledgers are finalized in few seconds; while
we observe that some ledgers take around 30-40 seconds to close, almost 99% of the
ledgers created in the first two months of 2015 were closed in less than 20 seconds.

Transactions dynamics over time: In Figure 3(b), we compute the number of per-
formed Ripple transactions over time. Our findings show that the number of transac-
tions performed in the Ripple system has been steadily increasing over time. For in-
stance, in the first two months of 2015, more than 20,000,000 Ripple transactions have
been executed. Our findings however indicate that more than 60% of these transactions
correspond to Offers in the system—and not to actual payments—while OfferCancel
transactions correspond to 20% of the total transactions in the system. Payment trans-
actions comprise less than 15% of the total transactions in the system, and are only
increasing marginally over time. For example, there are almost 33,000 payment trans-