Shocking Revelation: Ripple Predates Bitcoin—New Evidence Emerges
The crypto timeline just got flipped on its head. A newly uncovered document suggests Ripple’s tech roots stretch back further than Bitcoin’s—rewriting the industry’s origin story.
### The Bombshell Document
Buried archives reveal Ripple’s conceptual framework may have been quietly brewing before Satoshi’s whitepaper dropped. Cue the conspiracy theories.
### Why This Matters
If verified, this could reshuffle crypto’s founding mythology—and maybe even XRP’s legal standing. Lawyers are already salivating.
### The Finance Angle
Because nothing gets VCs hotter than an ‘I told you so’ moment—especially when it involves a coin they’ve already bet millions on.
One thing’s certain: the crypto history books need an update. And the Bitcoin maxis? They’ll need a drink.
Email Exchange Raises Timeline Questions
In the 2014 thread, Bailey points out that Ryan Fugger first sketched out a payment system in 2004. Back then, it wasn’t meant to be a public, mined cryptocurrency.
It was called RipplePay, and it let folks move value without banks. Bailey says Chris Larsen later saw Bitcoin’s buzz and steered Ripple in a crypto direction.
Cliff jumps in to stress that Ripple’s idea “predates Bitcoin,” though he argues it wasn’t a “copycat math-based currency” riding on Bitcoin’s hype.
2014 E-mails confirm: “Ripple is older than Bitcoin.”
pic.twitter.com/9c8cOF4065
— SMQKE (@SMQKEDQG) June 24, 2025
RipplePay’s Early Vision
Based on reports, Fugger’s 2004 project aimed to speed up payments between trusted parties. It leaned on digital trust rather than mining. Transactions were approved by a small group of validators—not by open mining.
That setup made it fast, but also private. It wasn’t until 2011 that developers began talking about an open network, one anyone could join to validate deals, rather than a gated club.
In 2011, Jed McCaleb teamed up with Arthur Britto and David Schwartz to code what they called the XRP Ledger. They wanted a version of Bitcoin that skipped proof-of-work.
By 2012, Fugger passed the torch, and McCaleb, Larsen and others launched NewCoin. The name switched to OpenCoin in 2013, then to Ripple in 2015.
Based on the timeline, XRP the token went live in 2012—three years after Netflix hit 1 million subscribers in the US, and about 10 years before McCaleb sold his last coins in 2022.
When XRP started, its founders gifted 80 billion tokens to the company. McCaleb got 9.5 billion XRP of that stash. He agreed to sell his holdings bit by bit to avoid sudden market shocks.
His final XRP sales wrapped up in 2022. After exiting, he helped start Stellar. Larsen stayed on and today leads Ripple as its chairman.
Even though Bitcoin gets the credit as the first real cryptocurrency, Ripple actually laid the groundwork years earlier – at least according to the document — showing that the dream of sending value without a middleman was already taking shape.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
