Ripple’s backstory just got a little twist. According to a set of emails from 2014, early notes on what became Ripple go as far back as 2004.
They hint that Ripple’s seed was planted long before anyone mined the very first bitcoin block in January 2009.
In the 2014 thread, Bailey points out that Ryan Fugger first sketched out a payment system in 2004. Back then, it wasn’t meant to be a public, mined cryptocurrency.
Cliff jumps in to stress that Ripple’s idea “predates Bitcoin,” though he argues it wasn’t a “copycat math-based currency” riding on Bitcoin’s hype.
Based on reports, Fugger’s 2004 project aimed to speed up payments between trusted parties. It leaned on digital trust rather than mining. Transactions were approved by a small group of validators—not by open mining.
That setup made it fast, but also private. It wasn’t until 2011 that developers began talking about an open network, one anyone could join to validate deals, rather than a gated club.
By 2012, Fugger passed the torch, and McCaleb, Larsen and others launched NewCoin. The name switched to OpenCoin in 2013, then to Ripple in 2015.
Based on the timeline, XRP the token went live in 2012—three years after Netflix hit 1 million subscribers in the US, and about 10 years before McCaleb sold his last coins in 2022.
When XRP started, its founders gifted 80 billion tokens to the company. McCaleb got 9.5 billion XRP of that stash. He agreed to sell his holdings bit by bit to avoid sudden market shocks.
His final XRP sales wrapped up in 2022. After exiting, he helped start Stellar. Larsen stayed on and today leads Ripple as its chairman.
Even though Bitcoin gets the credit as the first real cryptocurrency, Ripple actually laid the groundwork years earlier – at least according to the document — showing that the dream of sending value without a middleman was already taking shape.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
