Payment cryptocurrencies: XRP, Litecoin, Stellar and Bitcoin Cash

XRP, Litecoin, Stellar and Bitcoin Cash were built to move money fast and cheaply, and together they were worth $95.2 billion on 5 November, by CoinGecko data. The two largest dollar stablecoins, USDT and USDC, were worth $248.6 billion. Stablecoins now carry much of the traffic these payment cryptocurrencies were designed for, and two of the four networks, XRP Ledger and Stellar, host dollar stablecoins themselves.

Four coins, four designs

• XRP: the XRP Ledger settles a payment in 3 to 5 seconds without mining, and its creators issued all 100 billion XRP at launch;
• Litecoin: a Bitcoin fork with blocks every 2.5 minutes and a cap of 84 million coins;
• Stellar: a network run by a non-profit foundation, built for transfers between currencies;
• Bitcoin Cash: a 2017 Bitcoin fork with bigger blocks, so more payments fit into each one.

XRP: the bank-facing ledger

Jed McCaleb, Chris Larsen and Arthur Britto launched the XRP Ledger in 2012 and founded the company now called Ripple. Validators on the ledger agree on transactions through a voting process, with no miners. XRP makes up 84% of the sector’s value at $79.9 billion. It set its record of $3.65 in July 2025 and trades at $1.26, 65% below it. Ripple has also launched its own dollar stablecoin, RLUSD, on the same ledger, so XRP now competes with a product from the company closest to it. Our XRP guide has the full history.

Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash: two forks of Bitcoin

Charlie Lee, then an engineer at Google, created Litecoin in October 2011 and called it silver to Bitcoin’s gold. In May 2017 Litecoin activated SegWit, the upgrade that lets a block hold more transactions, months before Bitcoin did. In 2022 it added MWEB, an optional layer that hides amounts. LTC peaked at $410.26 in May 2021 and trades at $53.08.

Bitcoin Cash split from Bitcoin on 1 August 2017 at block 478,559, after a dispute over how to fit more payments into the network. Its supporters raised the block size limit to 8 MB and later to 32 MB, and everyone who held BTC at the fork received the same amount of BCH. BCH reached $3,785.82 in December 2017 and now trades 93% lower at $281.45.

Stellar: transfers between currencies

Jed McCaleb left Ripple and founded Stellar in 2014 with lawyer Joyce Kim. A non-profit, the Stellar Development Foundation, supports the network. Banks and payment firms use Stellar to issue tokens for national currencies and swap them in one transaction. Circle issues USDC on Stellar too. XLM peaked at $0.88 in January 2018 and trades at $0.16.

What it means for you

To send money abroad with crypto, you can move a stablecoin over XRP Ledger or Stellar and hold no XRP or XLM beyond the small reserve each network requires. Compare these coins on fees, settlement time and the companies that run payments on each network. Tron, for example, carries a large share of USDT payments, as we found when we counted them. Our overview of crypto sectors shows where payment coins stand next to the rest of the market.

Prices as of 5 November 2026, from CoinGecko. This is not investment advice.