A recent discovery by community figure SMOQE sheds new light on Ripple’s origins. He shared a private email thread from 2014 that reveals Ripple’s story may stretch back to 2004 – long before Bitcoin ever existed.
The discussion began when tech journalist Reutzel Bailey noted that Ryan Fugger first described and worked on what became RipplePay in 2004. That’s four years before Satoshi released the Bitcoin whitepaper. By contrast, Bitcoin’s public introduction wasn’t until 2008, and XRP’s own launch didn’t happen until 2012.
In that same email chain, Bailey explains that Chris Larsen came in later and built the company we now know as Ripple. He turned Fugger’s early idea into a functioning crypto platform. Yet, Bailey adds that Ripple wasn’t originally meant to be a cryptocurrency in the same sense as Bitcoin. Its evolution into a token-based payment network was driven partly by the hype around crypto in 2012.
When another member of the conversation, Jeffrey Cliff, weighed in, he made it clear that Ripple preceded Bitcoin in its concept phase. He stressed that calling Ripple a “copycat” math-based currency misses the point. Ripple’s groundwork, he said, was laid before Bitcoin’s code ever landed.
2014 E-mails confirm: “Ripple is older than Bitcoin.” pic.twitter.com/9c8cOF4065
— SMQKE (@SMQKEDQG) June 24, 2025
Here’s how it all fits together: Ryan Fugger created RipplePay to move money without banks in 2004. By 2011, Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, and David Schwartz were sketching out what became the XRP Ledger. McCaleb then convinced Fugger to hand over control of RipplePay, and together with Chris Larsen, they brought NewCoin to life in 2012.
The project went through a couple of name changes – from NewCoin to OpenCoin, then finally to Ripple by 2015. At its inception, the XRP Ledger gifted 80 billion XRP tokens to the company, with McCaleb receiving 9.5 billion of them. After McCaleb left in 2013 to co-found Stellar, he slowly sold his remaining XRP by 2022. Larsen stayed on, eventually guiding the company as its current chairman.
So yes – Ripple as a project has roots in 2004, predating Bitcoin’s whitepaper. But in terms of public, decentralized digital money, Bitcoin still holds the crown. It went live in 2008, while XRP only began trading in 2012. The takeaway is striking: Ripple’s origins are deeper and more nuanced than many realize, even if Bitcoin remains the first true cryptocurrency.
Read also: This Analyst Says XRP Price Could Surge Between July and September – Here’s the Math Behind the Prediction
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The post Ripple May Be Older Than Bitcoin – Here’s the Forgotten History appeared first on CaptainAltcoin.
