Was Bitcoin really the first? Not quite, says Ripple's David Schwartz
Ripple CTO emeritus David Schwartz clarifies that Ryan Fugger sketched a decentralized payment network in 2004, years before Bitcoin, but XRP and the XRP Ledger did not arrive until 2012.
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. @JoelKatz, 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 $BTC launched in 2009.
What RipplePay Was, and What It Was Not
The distinction Schwartz draws matters. Fugger's 2004 project was a payment system based on mutual trust between users, with no blockchain and no digital coins. 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. 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 $XRP.
Schwartz clarified that Fugger conceptualized a decentralized payment and settlement network "but without decentralized assets" around 2004, well before Bitcoin. That single qualifier carries most of the weight: the idea predates Bitcoin, but the coin does not.
From RipplePay to the XRP Ledger
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. The code was written entirely from scratch. 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.
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. Only the name carried over from Fugger's era. The technical architecture was entirely new.
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.
Sources:
crypto.news: Was XRP created before Bitcoin? David Schwartz responds
XRPL.org: XRP Ledger History
U.Today: Did Ryan Fugger Create XRP? Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz Ends Speculation
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Crypto RichRich has been researching cryptocurrency and blockchain technology for eight years and has served as a senior analyst at BSCN since its founding in 2020. He focuses on fundamental analysis of early-stage crypto projects and tokens and has published in-depth research reports on over 200 emerging protocols. Rich also writes about broader technology and scientific trends and maintains active involvement in the crypto community through X/Twitter Spaces, and leading industry events.