A fresh claim that XRP predates Bitcoin by decades has drawn a response from Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz — and the answer is more nuanced than either side might want.
It starts with Ryan Fugger, who designed a decentralized payment and settlement network around 2004. That’s roughly five years before Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper. Schwartz confirmed the timeline on X, but pointed out a critical gap: Fugger’s system had no decentralized assets at all.
Fugger’s design, later known as RipplePay, was a trust-based credit network. Users routed value through pre-existing relationships rather than a shared cryptographic ledger. There was no native token, no open asset — nothing you could trade independently. Bitcoin introduced open bearer assets secured by proof of work. The XRP Ledger came later with its own model, but it arrived after Bitcoin, not before.
The XRP Ledger went live in 2012, three years after Bitcoin’s genesis block. Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, and Schwartz built the protocol together before Ripple took over stewardship. So while Fugger’s concept predates Bitcoin, the actual XRP token does not.
The distinction matters beyond historical accuracy. Origin stories in crypto tend to conflate an idea with its execution — and that pattern keeps repeating. XRP recently tested the $1 psychological level amid a sharp slide from earlier highs. Meanwhile, Ripple obtained European MiCA approval via a Luxembourg license, broadening its regulatory footprint across the continent.
