Ripple’s background story just got a little turn. According to a series of e -mails from 2014, early notes will go back to Ripple until 2004.
This is four years before Satoshi Nakamoto has published the Bitcoin WhitePaper. These e -mails, which are shared by XRP Community Figure Smoqe, contain comments from the Tech author Reutzel Bailey and the Industry insider Jeffrey Cliff.
They indicated that ripple seeds had been planted for a long time before someone broke off the very first Bitcoin block in January 2009.
E -Mail exchange raises timeline questions
In the 2014 thread, Bailey points out that Ryan Fugger outlined a payment system for the first time in 2004. At that time it was not intended as a public, depicted cryptocurrency.
It was called Ripplepay and let people move the value without banks. According to Bailey, Chris Larsen saw Bitcoins sums later and directed Ripple in Krypto direction.
Cliff jumps into the stress that Ripple is doing the idea of Bitcoin, although he argues that it is not a “mathematical mathematical currency” on Bitcoins hype.
Confirm emails 2014: “Ripple is older than Bitcoin.” 🙇ã pages
– SMQKE (@smqkedqg) June 24, 2025
Ripplepays early vision
Based on reports, Fugger’s 2004 project aimed to accelerate the payments between trustworthy parties. It was based on digital trust rather than mining. Transactions were approved by a small group of validators – not by open mining.
This setup made it quick, but also privately. It was only in 2011 that developers to talk about an open network, one that everyone could join in to validate shops instead of a gated club.
Image: WazirX
XRP Ledger is being built in 2012
In 2011, Jed McCaleb teamed up with Arthur Britto and David Schwartz to encode what they described as XRP Ledger. They wanted a version of Bitcoin that skipped proof-of work work.
Until 2012, Fugger said goodbye to the torch, and McCaleb, Larsen and others started Newcoin. The name moved to Opencoin in 2013 and then in 2015 to Ripple.
Based on the timeline, XRP the Token 2012 went live – three years after Netflix reached 1 million subscribers in the USA and about 10 years before McCaleb sold his last coins in 2022.
Token gifts and leadership movements
When XRP started, the founders gave 80 billion tokens to the company. McCaleb got 9.5 billion XRP of this supply. He agreed to sell his stocks to avoid sudden market shocks.
His last XRP sales were completed in 2022. After the end he helped start Stellar. Larsen stayed and now runs Ripple as chairman.
Although Bitcoin is the first real cryptocurrency Bitcoin, Ripple actually put the basic work – at least according to the document – that the dream of sending value without a middleman already adopted shape.
Selected picture of Unsplash, Diagram from Tradingview
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