RIPEMD-160 Hash Generator
Turn any text into its 40-character RIPEMD-160 hash instantly.
How to use the RIPEMD-160 Hash Generator
- Type or paste your text in the box.
- The RIPEMD-160 hash appears as you type.
- Click Copy to grab the result.
About the RIPEMD-160 Hash Generator
RIPEMD-160 was designed by Hans Dobbertin, Antoon Bosselaers and Bart Preneel and published in 1996. It produces a 160-bit digest — 40 hexadecimal characters — and it exists because its authors wanted a hash with more headroom than the 128-bit designs of the day, several of which were already falling apart. What sets it apart from its contemporaries is not the maths so much as the provenance: it came out of the open European academic community, specifically the RIPE project, rather than from the NSA. Every design choice was published and picked over in the open.
That provenance is a large part of why Bitcoin chose it. A Bitcoin address is built by applying RIPEMD-160 to a SHA-256 hash of the public key — the step known as HASH160. Using two hashes from two unrelated design lineages means a break in one family does not automatically break addresses, and picking a non-NSA function for the outer step was a deliberate hedge. Ethereum carries the same thinking forward by exposing RIPEMD-160 as a precompiled contract.
Security-wise RIPEMD-160 has aged well: there is no known practical collision attack, which is more than SHA-1 — its 160-bit contemporary — can say. The catch is that almost nobody uses it outside cryptocurrency, so it has attracted far less cryptanalytic attention than the SHA family, and "unbroken" partly reflects how few people have seriously attacked it. For new work SHA-256 remains the default; for anything touching Bitcoin or Ethereum addresses, RIPEMD-160 is not optional.
Frequently asked questions
Can I decrypt or reverse a RIPEMD-160 hash?
No. Hashing is one-way and the input is not stored inside the output, so there is nothing to decrypt. The only way "back" is to guess an input and hash it to see if it matches.
Is this the same as Bitcoin's HASH160?
Not quite. HASH160 is RIPEMD-160 applied to the SHA-256 hash of the data — two steps. This tool does the RIPEMD-160 step on whatever you type, so to reproduce HASH160 you would hash with SHA-256 first and feed the raw bytes of that digest in here.
Why is my RIPEMD-160 hash always 40 characters?
RIPEMD-160 always outputs 160 bits, and each hex character represents 4 bits, so every hash is exactly 40 characters regardless of input length.
Is RIPEMD-160 safer than SHA-1?
Both output 160 bits, but SHA-1 has a demonstrated practical collision attack and RIPEMD-160 does not. That said, RIPEMD-160 has been studied far less, so SHA-256 is still the better choice for new designs.
Is my text sent anywhere?
Your text is sent to our server to be hashed, because browsers cannot compute RIPEMD-160 — they only expose the SHA family. It is hashed and immediately discarded, never logged and never stored.