XRP community figure SMOQE shares a document suggesting that Ripple is technically older than Bitcoin.
The document contains a 2014 e-mail conversation among industry stakeholders, including tech journalist Reutzel Bailey.
During the conversation, Bailey suggested that Ripple’s origin dates back to 2004, four years before Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper.
According to Bailey, Ryan Fugger first conceived the idea behind Ripple in 2004. Despite this, Bailey emphasized that Ripple’s co-founder, Chris Larsen, built the company and brought it into the mainstream a few years after its founding. Bailey suggested that Larsen’s motivation stemmed from the attention Bitcoin received at the time.
“I think Larsen pushed this [Ripple] as a cryptocurrency to catch attention because the platform itself was not really about cryptocurrency at all,” Bailey remarked.
2014 E-mails confirm: “Ripple is older than Bitcoin.”🙇♂️
— SMQKE (@SMQKEDQG) June 24, 2025
Bitcoin Remains World’s First Cryptocurrency
Meanwhile, in the email conversation, Jeffrey Cliff dispelled claims that Ripple launched as a “copycat math-based currency” riding Bitcoin’s hype. He emphasized that “Ripple predates Bitcoin.”
The conversation suggests that the idea behind Ripple may have been conceived long before BTC was developed, making the company older than Bitcoin. While Ripple’s inception dates back to 2004, XRP launched in 2012, four years after Bitcoin’s inception.
This indicates that although Ripple might be technically older than Bitcoin, BTC remains the world’s first cryptocurrency, having been launched four years before XRP.
Ripple Origin
As Bailey mentioned, Ryan Fugger first conceived the idea behind Ripple in 2004. At the time, he launched a project named RipplePay to empower people to move value without relying on banks.
In 2011, Ripple’s co-founder, Jed McCaleb, worked alongside Arthur Britto and David Schwartz to develop the XRP Ledger (XRPL), the technology underlying XRP. These engineers focused on creating a better version of Bitcoin, addressing its limitations, particularly its reliance on the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism.
As XRPL development gained momentum in 2011, McCaleb approached Fugger, convincing him to transform RipplePay into a crypto network. Fugger granted this request, handing RipplePay to him. He later teamed up with Chris Larsen to launch NewCoin in 2012.
They changed the company’s name twice between 2012 and 2015 from OpenCoin to Ripple, which remains the firm’s official name to date. Interestingly, the founders of XRPL gifted 80 billion XRP to the company in 2012.
In particular, McCaleb received 9.5 billion XRP of the donation. Following his exit from the project, McCaleb agreed to sell his XRP holdings gradually, with the last stash liquidated in 2022.
While McCaleb left Ripple and co-founded Stellar, Larsen has remained with Ripple to date and currently serves as its chairman.
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