Ripple’s back story just got a little twist. According to a set of e -mail messages from 2014, early notes are going on what became Ripple as far back as 2004.
It’s four years before Satoshi Nakamoto Lay out Bitcoin -Whitepaper. These e -mail messages, shared by XRP Community character SMOQE, contains comments from technical writer Reutzel Bailey and industry side Jeffrey Cliff.
They suggest that Ripples seeds were planted long before anyone breaks the very first bitcoin block in January 2009.
E -post exchange raises timeline issues
In the thread in 2014, Bailey points out that Ryan Fugger first sketched out a payment system in 2004. Then it was not intended to be a public, broken Cryptocurrency.
It was called Ripplepay, and it lets people move value without banks. Says Bailey Chris Larsen Later, Bitcoin’s buzz saw and steered ripple in a crypto direction.
Cliff jumps in to emphasize that Ripple’s idea “precedes Bitcoin”, although he claims it was not a “copycat mathematics -based currency” riding Bitcoin’s hype.
2014 E-mail confirms: “Rippel is older than bitcoin.”
– SMQKE (@SMQKEDQG) June 24, 2025
Ripplepay’s early vision
Based on reports, Fugger’s project 2004 was aimed at speeding up payments between reliable parties. It leaned to digital trust rather than mining. Transactions were approved by a small group of validers – not through open mining.
That installation did it quickly, but also private. It wasn’t until 2011 that developers started talking about an open network, one that someone could join to validate offers rather than a gated club.
Image: WazirX
XRP LEDGER shows up in 2012
In 2011, Jed McCaleb collaborated with Arthur Britto and David Schwartz to code what they called XRP LEDGER. They wanted a version of Bitcoin that skipped proof-of-work.
In 2012, Fugger passed the torch, and McCaleb, Larsen and others launched Newcoin. The name switched to Opencoin 2013, then to Ripple 2015.
Based on the timeline, XRP Token went live 2012 – three years after Netflix met 1 million subscribers in the United States, and about ten years before McCaleb sold his last coins in 2022.
Token gifts and executive movements
When XRP started, the founders committed 80 billion symbols to the company. McCaleb received 9.5 billion XRP from that stash. He agreed to sell his holdings bit by bit to avoid sudden market shocks.
His last XRP sales were collected in 2022. After leaving, he helped Stellar. Larsen stayed and today leads Ripple as chairman.
Although Bitcoin receives credit as the first real Cryptocurrency, Ripple actually lays the foundation years earlier – at least according to the document – which shows that the dream of sending value without an intermediary already took shape.
Image from Unsplash, charts from TradingView
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