The NSA’s Shadow in Crypto: How XRP’s Origins Trace Back to Classified Tech

Buried patents and military-grade cryptography—the untold backstory of Ripple’s controversial asset.

The spyware hiding in plain sight

Before XRP became the bankers’ favorite crypto, its core tech allegedly passed through Fort Meade’s servers. Forgotten USPTO filings reveal elliptic curve signatures suspiciously similar to NSA-licensed protocols.

A patent paper trail gone cold

Three abandoned patent applications from 2005-2008 describe distributed ledger mechanics that would later appear in Ripple’s whitepapers—filed by developers with defense contractor ties. Of course nobody kept the receipts.

Meanwhile in 2025...

While hedge funds argue about SEC classifications, the blockchain quietly processes $2B daily—proving once again that in finance, the most profitable tech usually has questionable provenance.

• David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO, holds a 1991 U.S. patent for distributed consensus technology.
• XRP Ledger’s creation predates the blockchain boom and was engineered with NSA-grade logic.
• The team behind XRP included key figures like Arthur Britto and Jed McCaleb with a vision beyond retail use.

Long before Ripple made headlines for shaking up cross-border payments, a quiet architect named David Schwartz had already laid the foundation for what would later become the XRP Ledger. But Schwartz didn’t emerge from Silicon Valley hype.

What if I told you the man behind XRP used to build tech for the NSA?
And that the XRP Ledger wasn’t born in a garage…
…but inside the same machine it now threatens to replace.
Read this entire thread before they wipe it.
🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/U0N1E5TLlO

Instead, his early career traces back to Fort Meade, Maryland, where he worked as a contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). There, he specialized in designing distributed computing systems, technologies critical for surveillance, coordination, and secure consensus.

In 1991, Schwartz filed U.S. Patent #5025368, titled “Computer System for Distributed Consensus.” This patent described a network design that allowed multiple machines to reach agreement without centralized control, a concept now essential to blockchain. The timing is notable: this was nearly two decades before Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper, and the patent quietly expired in 2011. XRP was launched a year later.

XRP Designed for Institutions with Instant Settlement

The XRP Ledger wasn’t invented in a garage, nor was it announced in a WHITE paper. It was written by David Schwartz, Arthur Britto, and Jed McCaleb. Schwartz designed the protocol architecture and Britto was the behind-the-scenes guy, hardly ever seen in public discourse. McCaleb, who had famously mishandled Mt. Gox and then started Stellar, brought with him liquidity expertise and experience from early exchanges.

Together, they designed a ledger that allows almost instantaneous settlement, consumes little energy, and requires no mining. Those were not features born out of an accident; they were purposely designed for institutions. XRP was never meant to be a “people’s coin.” Its design targets government corridors and financial systems that embrace compliance rather than chaos.

Unlike Bitcoin’s trustless ideology, the XRP Ledger adopted from the outset a consensus mechanism with known validators who govern the network. That ultimately made it a much-preferred tool for central banks and payment providers, while crypto purists relegated it to the centralization dustbin.

From Black Ops to Blockchain

While others chased the headlines and the retail hype, Schwartz stayed silent. He had already testified in court that he had been working on a system similar to bitcoin as early as 2004, five years before the word “blockchain” even existed. Silence is not hesitation; it is operational discretion.

The XRP Ledger launched in 2012, with no ICO or mining. All 100 billion tokens were minted from the start, so it wasn’t a speculative playground; it was an infrastructure model that could operate under the radar until the world caught up.

Related Reading | REX Shares Files Effective Prospectus for Solana, ethereum Staking ETFs