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Ripple’s backstory is a bit twisted. According to a series of emails since 2014, early notes about ripples date back to 2004.
It was four years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper. The emails were shared by XRP community figure Smoqe, which included comments from tech writer Reutzel Bailey and industry insider Jeffrey Cliff.
They suggest that in January 2009, anyone had planted Ripple’s seeds before they mined the first bitcoin block.
Email exchange raises timetable questions
Bailey noted in his 2014 thread that Ryan Fugger first outlined the payment system in 2004. At that time, it was not about becoming a cryptocurrency mined by the public.
It is called Ripplepay, which allows people to move value without a bank. Bailey said Chris Larsen later saw the buzz of Bitcoin and turned to ripples in the direction of encryption.
Cliff jumped in to emphasize Ripple’s idea “before Bitcoin,” although he believes it’s not a “currency based on imitation mathematics” for Bitcoin hype.
Email confirmation in 2014: “Ripple are older than Bitcoin.” 🙇♂️
-smqke(@smqkedqg) June 24, 2025
Ripplepay’s early vision
According to the report, Fugger’s 2004 project aims to speed up payments between trusted parties. It relies on digital trust rather than mining. The transaction was approved by a small number of validators, rather than through open mining.
This setup makes it fast, but also private. It wasn’t until 2011 that developers started talking about open networks where anyone could join a verification deal instead of a closed club.
Image: WazirX
XRP Ledger appeared in 2012
In 2011, Jed McCaleb collaborated with Arthur Britto and David Schwartz to encode what they call XRP Ledger. They want a version of Bitcoin that skips proof of work.
By 2012, Fugger passed the Torch, McCaleb, Larsen and others launched Newcoin. The name switched to Opencoin in 2013 and then moved to Ripple in 2015.
According to the schedule, the XRP token went live in 2012 – Netflix hit 1 million subscribers in the United States for three years, while McCaleb sold his last coin in 2022 for just about 10 years.
Token Gifts and Administrative Actions
When XRP started, its founders presented 80 billion tokens to the company. McCaleb received a 9.5 billion XRP hiding place. He agreed to sell his shares little by little to avoid sudden market shocks.
His final XRP sales ended in 2022. After quitting, he helped found Stellar. Larsen persisted and today led Ripple as chairman.
Although Bitcoin gained credibility as the first real cryptocurrency, Ripple actually laid the foundation engineering a few years ago (at least according to the document) showing that the dream of sending value without the middleman is already taking shape.
Featured images from Unsplash, charts for TradingView
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