Headline: Did XRP Come Before Bitcoin? Ripple Co‑Creator David Schwartz Sets the Record Straight
A recent social media flare‑up over whether XRP predated Bitcoin drew a direct response from XRP co‑creator and Ripple CTO emeritus David Schwartz — and helped clear a common source of confusion.
The debate began after an X post claimed “Bitcoin was NOT the 1st” and asserted XRP was created in 1988. That prompted user MitchRob to ask Schwartz whether Ryan Fugger had conceived XRP and the XRP Ledger before or after Bitcoin. Schwartz answered: Fugger did conceive a decentralized payment and settlement network “but without decentralized assets” around 2004 — well before Bitcoin’s 2009 launch. Crucially, that early idea was not XRP as we know it.
What actually matters
- Ryan Fugger’s RipplePay (circa 2004) focused on payments, IOUs and trust lines between users. It wasn’t a blockchain in the modern sense and had no native decentralized asset.
- The XRP Ledger and the native token XRP were developed later. Official XRPL history places the ledger’s launch in 2012, after Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto joined efforts in 2011 to build a faster, more scalable distributed ledger with a native asset.
- In short: Fugger’s payment concept predated Bitcoin; XRP and the XRPL did not.
Unanswered questions and naming confusion
MitchRob also asked whether Satoshi Nakamoto might have been inspired by Fugger’s earlier work — a speculative point Schwartz didn’t answer in the thread, and there’s no public evidence linking Satoshi to Fugger’s ideas. The muddle often stems from names: Fugger’s RipplePay predates Bitcoin, while the XRP Ledger (and the Ripple company name that followed) is a separate technical lineage built later.
Where XRPL stands today
Schwartz, now CTO emeritus and still an XRPL co‑creator, continues to be involved in the ecosystem’s development. Recent work includes the XRPL 3.2.0 upgrade that renamed core server software from rippled to xrpld and implemented cleanup fixes for DeFi‑related features, vaults, lending, permissioned domains and token functions. Usage of XRPL is also expanding beyond payments into tokenized assets, stablecoins and other tokenized finance applications.
Bottom line
The social media claim that XRP existed before Bitcoin is misleading. Ryan Fugger did propose an early decentralized payments idea in 2004, but the XRP Ledger and the XRP token were developed later by Schwartz, McCaleb and Britto — after Bitcoin’s arrival.
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