XRP and Bitcoin are being debated in a fresh origin-story debate as claims emerge that not only is the XRP idea stolen, but that Bitcoin was not the first digital asset. These claims have since gained attention in the crypto industry, even drawing commentary from major experts in the space as they move to debunk these claims.
A First-Mover Before Bitcoin And XRP Arrived?
The claims making the rounds suggest that Ryan Fugger was the first to launch a cryptocurrency, years before Bitcoin came out. Not only that, but the claims also suggest that XRP has a predecessor called RipplePay, which was built in 2004. This suggests that it came five years before Bitcoin, which was launched in 2009, and eight years before Ripple’s XRP, which was launched in 2012.
The discussion resurfaced after Ripple CTO David Schwartz addressed speculation on X that Fugger may have created XRP before Bitcoin. Schwartz’s answer, echoed by XRP history pages and older Ripple materials, is that Fugger did build an early decentralized payment idea in 2004, but it was different in the way it worked. Fugger’s system was a trust-network system, not the digital asset now known as XRP, which operates very differently.
The truth is that RipplePay does predate Bitcoin, but the XRP Ledger and XRP do not. The distinction helps explain why the name "Ripple" causes so much confusion across old forum posts, archived papers, and later company branding, due to the similarities in the naming.
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What Ryan Fugger actually built in 2004
Fugger’s original paper, "Money as IOUs in Social Trust Networks & A Proposal for a Decentralized Currency Network Protocol", was first published in April 2004. This paper describes a system for moving value through trust lines and IOUs between people who already know one another. That is conceptually important, but it is not the same thing as a blockchain token, which does not require people to already know one another before they can transact with each other.
Fugger later said in a 2015 email thread archived by the W3C that he "started the original Ripple project back in 2004,” and shared his admiration for Bitcoin as an elegant decentralized currency. However, Fugger also noted in the email that Bitcoin did not handle credit well. This history has been widely cited in XRP discussions, but it still does not mean XRP existed in 2004. It just means the early Ripple concept did.
The official XRP Ledger history page says the ledger was developed in 2011 by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto, with the XRP Ledger first launching in June 2012. The mission says it was to build a more sustainable system for payments than Bitcoin’s proof-of-work model. In other words, the technical asset XRP arrived after Bitcoin had already launched in 2009 as a sort of improvement.
Ripple Labs was originally called OpenCoin when it first launched. However, the team had acquired RipplePay from Fugger before furthering its blockchain mission, and apparently changed its name to Ripple Labs due to its catchiness. While Fugger did come up with a decentralized payment network, it did not make use of any decentralized assets in its processes, Schwartz clarified.
It also shows a major distinction between the reasons behind the creation of Bitcoin and XRP. For Bitcoin, it was building a peer-to-peer monetary system secured by proof-of-work. XRP, in contrast, emerged from a separate development effort that was explicitly trying to improve payment speed and scalability.
Sho, while Ryan Fugger helped originate a payment-network concept in 2004, Bitcoin came years later, and three years before XRP. That timeline does not diminish Fugger’s contribution, but it does close the door on claims that XRP was already around five years before Bitcoin.