  Cryptocurrencies are rapidly finding application in areas such as Real Time
Gross Settlements and Payments. Ripple is a cryptocurrency that has gained
prominence with banks and payment providers. It solves the Byzantine General's
Problem with its Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA), where each server
maintains a list of servers, called the Unique Node List (UNL), that represents
the network for that server and will not collectively defraud it. The server
believes that the network has come to a consensus when servers on the UNL come
to a consensus on a transaction.
  In this paper we improve Ripple to achieve better speed, security and last
mile connectivity. We implement guidelines for resilience, robustness, improved
security, and efficient information propagation (IP). We enhance the system to
ensure that each server receives information from across the whole network
rather than just from the UNL members. We introduce the paradigm of UNL overlap
as a function of IP and the trust a server assigns to its own UNL. Our design
makes it possible to identify and mitigate some malicious behaviours including
attempts to fraudulently Double Spend or stall the system. We provide
experimental evidence of the benefits of our approach over the current Ripple
scheme. We observe $\geq 99.67\%$ reduction in opportunities for double spend
attacks and censorship, $1.71x$ increase in fault tolerance to $\geq 34.21\%$
malicious nodes, $\geq 4.97x$ and $98.22x$ speedup and success rate for IP
respectively, and $\geq 3.16x$ and $51.70x$ speedup and success rate in
consensus respectively.
