Ripple is a real-time settlement and remittance network that is designed for the banking industry. Its settlement infrastructure technology has been adopted by a growing list of financial institutions looking to leverage the benefits of distributed ledgers. Ripple's real-time settlement network connects banks and enables cross border settlements and transactions in real-time. The current settlement infrastructure requires many intermediaries, and performing transactions take time and cost money. Ripple provides the underlying infrastructure for banks, and enables these transactions to be executed directly at almost no cost.

Stellar is a decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money, in any pair of currencies, directly on the internet. Stellar enables users to transfer money on their network directly, without banks, and without fees. It was originally created by Jed McCaleb, the founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple.
Stellar has its own native coin called Lumens (XLM). All users must hold a minimum of 20 Lumens in order to ensure their authenticity and to maintain a wider distribution and free flow. Users must spend 0.00001 XLM in order to transfer fiat currencies. This provides the network with more liquidity for less popular currency pairs. Lumens are an inflationary currency with a fixed increase rate of 1% per year.
The network uses the Stellar Lumens Consensus Protocol (SCP). Unlike PoW or PoS consensus mechanisms, SCP relies on a Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA), in which specific groups of nodes are chosen to arrive at transaction agreement. This provides the Stellar network with more decentralized control.
Lightyear.io, a for-profit entity of Stellar, was launched in 2017 as the commercial arm of the company.

Bitcoin Gold (BTG) is a cryptocurrency that began in 2017 as a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain. BTG was created to reduce the monopolizing power of dedicated ASIC mining operations within the original Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Gold mining can be done by anyone with a standard computer and provides greater decentralization to the system. The hard fork that created BTG was meant to combat the disproportionate influence and competitive advantage of professional miners.