The XRP origin debate resurfaced on social media this week after a claim circulated on X that XRP predates Bitcoin, with its creation placed as far back as 1988. XRPL History page puts XRP’s launch in June 2012, three years after Bitcoin’s 2009 debut. Ripple CTO emeritus David Schwartz has now drawn the line publicly on what actually came first.
The exchange began when a user identified as Crypto Dyl News posted that ‘Bitcoin was NOT the 1st’ and attributed XRP’s creation to 1988. Community member MitchRob then asked Schwartz directly: did Ryan Fugger conceptualise XRP and the XRP Ledger before or after Bitcoin?
Schwartz confirmed that Fugger had conceptualised a decentralised payment and settlement network around 2004, before Bitcoin. He added a key qualifier: Fugger’s concept did not include decentralised assets. That distinction does most of the work in untangling the confusion.
Ryan Fugger Built RipplePay, Not XRP
Fugger’s 2004 project, RipplePay, centred on IOUs and trust lines between users. It was a payment concept, not a blockchain, and XRP was not part of it.
According to XRPL’s own documentation, Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto built the XRP Ledger with a native asset that became XRP. The ledger launched in June 2012. That same month, the three founders gifted 80 billion XRP to a new company initially called NewCoin, quickly renamed OpenCoin.
In September 2012, McCaleb and Britto, alongside Chris Larsen, formally incorporated the company as OpenCoin Inc., later rebranded as Ripple. The 80 billion XRP gift to Ripple was tied to the company committing to develop on the XRP Ledger. The XRPL learning portal notes the three developers joined forces in 2011 to build a faster and more scalable digital asset than Bitcoin.
The settlement speed case for XRP is specific: XRPL’s XRP overview states transactions settle in 3 to 5 seconds. That performance profile is what separated the project from Bitcoin in the founders’ original framing, not the question of which network existed first.
XRP Origin Debate and the Timeline That Settles It
The confusion in this debate has a structural cause: the word ‘Ripple’ attaches to two different things. Fugger’s RipplePay predates Bitcoin; the XRP Ledger does not. Ripple Labs adopted the Ripple name, but the technical system behind XRP was written separately by Schwartz, McCaleb, and Britto after Bitcoin already existed.
MitchRob’s follow-up questions, including whether Satoshi Nakamoto drew any inspiration from Fugger’s earlier work and which network has the stronger payments framework, remained unanswered in the thread at the time of reporting. The Satoshi question is speculative in any case: no public evidence in the thread links Fugger’s RipplePay to Bitcoin’s design.
Schwartz’s position in this exchange is that of CTO emeritus. According to Finst, Ripple announced in October 2025 that Schwartz would step down from his operational role by year-end. He became Ripple’s chief technology officer in 2018, as crypto.news reported when covering his transition away from daily leadership duties.
On the XRPL development side, the ledger has been moving steadily away from its older Ripple-branded infrastructure. The XRP Ledger 3.2.0 upgrade renamed the core server software from rippled to xrpld and added fixes for DeFi tooling, vaults, lending, permissioned domains, and token functions.
The origin question does not change any of that trajectory. The binary is straightforward: Fugger’s payment concept came in 2004, Bitcoin in 2009, XRP in 2012. What does matter for XRPL’s roadmap is whether the ledger’s tokenised finance expansion, which Schwartz flagged as covering stablecoins and tokenised assets beyond payments, attracts the TVL to justify that positioning. That is the live question; the 1988 claim is not.
