Satoshi

Satoshi Nakamoto

Bitcoin

<p>A debate that has quietly circulated in crypto circles for years has now been put to rest by one of the people best placed to answer it. <a href="https://x.com/JoelKatz" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">@JoelKatz</a>, Ripple CTO emeritus David Schwartz, confirmed on June 26, 2026 that Canadian developer Ryan Fugger conceptualized a decentralized payment and settlement network around 2004, several years before Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 and before <a href="https://x.com/search?q=%24BTC&amp;src=cashtag_click" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">$BTC</a> launched in 2009.</p>
<h2 id="what-ripplepay-was-and-what-it-was-not">What RipplePay Was, and What It Was Not</h2>
<p>The distinction Schwartz draws matters. <cite>Fugger's 2004 project was a payment system based on mutual trust between users, with no blockchain and no digital coins.</cite><cite>RipplePay functioned as a decentralized peer-to-peer financial network that allowed individuals to extend credit to one another through IOUs, a mechanism known as trust lines.</cite> It was a novel concept for its time, but it shared little technical DNA with what the crypto industry later came to know as Ripple or <a href="https://x.com/search?q=%24XRP&amp;src=cashtag_click" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">$XRP</a>.</p>
<p><cite>Schwartz clarified that Fugger conceptualized a decentralized payment and settlement network "but without decentralized assets" around 2004, well before Bitcoin.</cite> That single qualifier carries most of the weight: the idea predates Bitcoin, but the coin does not.</p>
<h2 id="from-ripplepay-to-the-xrp-ledger">From RipplePay to the XRP Ledger</h2>
<p><cite>Development of the XRP Ledger began in 2011, led by engineers David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto, with the ledger officially launching in June 2012.</cite> The code was written entirely from scratch. <cite>McCaleb, Britto, and Schwartz adapted concepts from the original Ripple Project but built the XRP Ledger as a new system, creating both the distributed ledger and the XRP token.</cite></p>
<p><cite>Shortly after the XRP Ledger launched, McCaleb, Britto, and Chris Larsen founded the company initially called NewCoin in September 2012, which was quickly renamed OpenCoin and later became Ripple.</cite> Only the name carried over from Fugger's era. The technical architecture was entirely new.</p>
<p>The bottom line is straightforward. The Ripple concept, as a vision for trust-based decentralized payments, does predate Bitcoin. The coin, the ledger, and the company do not. Schwartz's clarification does not rewrite $XRP's history so much as it correctly separates two distinct chapters that have often been conflated.</p>
<p><b>Sources:</b><br><a href="https://crypto.news/was-xrp-created-before-bitcoin-david-schwartz-responds/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">crypto.news: Was XRP created before Bitcoin? David Schwartz responds</a><br><a href="https://xrpl.org/about/history" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">XRPL.org: XRP Ledger History</a><br><a href="https://u.today/did-ryan-fugger-create-xrp-ripple-cto-emeritus-david-schwartz-ends-speculation" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">U.Today: Did Ryan Fugger Create XRP? Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz Ends Speculation</a></p>

Was Bitcoin really the first? Not quite, says Ripple's David Schwartz

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