So I've been looking because a bud was talking about it .. all I see is a centralized protocol that lightning network can/does fulfill the use case, and a claim of universal conversion to foreign currencies which literally any cryptocurrency can do on an exchange.
Am I confused?
I'm not really qualified to tell you exactly what it does, but I did pay a little attention to it for a little while when I was learning Bitcoin. almost every improvement an altcoin offers, can be solved with a layer2/3 solution at the expense of everything that Bitcoin stands for.
ie: decentralized, immutable, uncensoreable, and finite.
Read my avove reply. Only the blockchain is the same. The purpose, phylosophy is different. Many "altcoins" are not coins rather than tokens. E.g. Ethereumnis a completely different layer 1 infrastructure with the smart contracts built in the network. ADA is mainly for agriculture, Stellar Lumems is mainly for transportation (see IBM-Maersk solution to track all containers), Ripple is to replace SWIFT, Gaming tokens for gamers (to buy gadgets, ammo, armor, other "NFT"'s), and so on. Of course the first memecoins were just for fun (Doge) or pranking -/as a definitive Ponzi scheme prank, named Ponzicoin.
And there are/were scams e.g. the former Onecoin.
So it's a confusing thing to compare layer2 LN with a completely different token (I repeat: token, not cryptocurrency).
The main purpose of Ripple (on the exchanes: XRP) to replace the slow and expensive S.W.I.F.T. transactions.
Ripple is not truly decentralized because the company behind it make contract with banks. The main advantage of Ripple based crossborder money transactions (I mean fiat (!) transactions) that it takes only 2-secs regardless of source and destination country and regardless of currency type.
Just an addition: as I remember one of the founder the Ripple corporation died namy years ago and, because he never tell the wallet passcodes to anyone, he took millions of USD with him tonthe grave (of course in XRP).
Soooo.. what I'm hearing is the token's whole mechanism is that it settles transactions quickly in any currency (something I was under the impression basically any token on an exchange could do) and from what I can tell also... That LN does better in a less corruptible fashion.
