Ripple’s background frame has just made a touch. According to a set of emails from 2014, the first notes on what became Ripple dates back to 2004.
It’s four years before Satoshi Nakamoto took out the Bitcoin White Paper. These emails, shared by XRP Community Figure SMOQE, present comments from the technological writer Reutzel Bailey and the initiate of the Jeffrey Cliff industry.
They suggest that the Ripple seeds were planted long before anyone who first had the very first Bitcoin block in January 2009.
Email exchange increases chronology issues
In the 2014 thread, Bailey stresses that Ryan Fugger first sketched a payment system in 2004. At the time, it was not supposed to be a public cryptocurrency and mine.
His name was Ripplepay, and that allowed people to move the value without banks. Bailey says that Chris Larsen later saw Bitcoin Buzz and led the undulation in a cryptographic direction.
Cliff jumps to emphasize that Ripple’s idea “is anterior to Bitcoin”, although he argues that it was not a “copy mathematics” on Bitcoin’s media threshing.
The 2014 emails confirm: “Ripple is older than Bitcoin.” 🙇️
– smqke (@SMQKEDQG) June 24, 2025
Early vision of Ripplepay
Based on reports, the fleeting project in 2004 aimed to accelerate payments between trust parties. He relied on digital trust rather than mining. The transactions were approved by a small group of validators – not by the open operation.
This configuration did it quickly, but also private. It was not until 2011 that the developers began to speak of an open network, one that one could join to validate the agreements, rather than a closed club.
Image: WazirX
XRP Ledger emerged in 2012
In 2011, Jed McCaleb teamed up with Arthur Britto and David Schwartz to code what they called the XRP Ledger. They wanted a version of Bitcoin that jumped proof of work.
In 2012, Fugger passed the torch, and McCaleb, Larsen and others launched Newcoin. The name went to Opencoin in 2013, then to Ripple in 2015.
Based on the calendar, XRP The token was put online in 2012 – three years after Netflix struck 1 million subscribers in the United States, and about 10 years before McCaleb sold its latest parts in 2022.
Token gifts and executive movements
When XRP started, its founders offered 80 billion tokens to the company. McCaleb obtained 9.5 billion XRP from this reserve. He agreed to sell his assets little by little to avoid sudden shocks on the market.
His last XRP sales ended in 2022. After leaving, he helped start Stellar. Larsen stayed and is in the lead today Ripple as president.
Even if Bitcoin obtains credit as a first true cryptocurrency, Ripple has actually laid the basics of years earlier – at least according to the document – showing that the dream of sending value without intermediary was already taking shape.
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