How Old Is XRP? Testing the 1988, 2004 and 2012 Origin Stories

A graphic with more than 100,000 views says XRP was created in 1988, which would make it older than Bitcoin and the oldest digital asset in the world. Other posts say XRP started in 2004. The usual answer is 2012.

The video tests all three dates against the documents. One is a myth, one is a real ancestor, and one is the actual birthday. Knowing which is which matters, because a story that falls apart is a weak reason to hold anything.

Was XRP created in 1988?

No. The 1988 date comes from a real patent that has nothing to do with XRP.

The patent was filed on August 25, 1988 and granted on June 18, 1991. The inventor’s name on it is David J. Schwartz, and the viral post assumes this is the same David Schwartz who later helped write the XRP Ledger. That is where the story falls apart:

• The patent’s title is two words: “Computer system.”
• It describes a multi-level distributed computer system, meaning a large computing job split across several machines so they can work on it together.
• It mentions no coin, no ledger, no payments and no XRP.
• According to the video, Google Patents lists the current owner as Wintershall Dea, a German oil and gas company.

When the graphic spread in June 2026, former Ripple director Matt Hamilton said the patent has nothing to do with XRP. The video adds that Schwartz’s own replies that week put the start of XRP at 2012.

You can check this yourself in under a minute. Search for US patent 5025369, open it and read the title.

What happened in 2004?

In 2004 a Canadian programmer, Ryan Fugger, came up with the idea that gave Ripple its name. He had been working on a local exchange trading system in Vancouver, and his core idea was that money, as we know it, is made from promises.

His own example works like this. A friend, Alice, owes you $10. Normally that debt is stuck until she pays you back. But someone else who knows and trusts Alice might take her promise off your hands in exchange for something you want.

Fugger’s system gave people credit limits with the people they trusted. To pay someone, it searched for a chain of people who trusted each other, all the way from you to them. There was no bank in the middle, just promises passed along. He launched it as RipplePay in 2005.

In a clip shown in the video, David Schwartz says this idea started with Fugger, that Fugger’s work gave the company the name Ripple, and that the team built the idea into the XRP Ledger. He calls it “the coolest thing that we built.”

The key point: Fugger’s system never had a coin. 2004 is a real ancestor of the idea, not the birth of XRP.

Did Satoshi Nakamoto praise Ripple?

Yes, but the Ripple he praised was Fugger’s system, not XRP.

On April 20, 2009, a few months after Bitcoin launched, early developer Mike Hearn emailed Satoshi Nakamoto with a list of questions. He wrote that the last time he had been this excited about a monetary idea was when he discovered Ripple. Satoshi replied that Ripple was interesting because it was the only other system that did something with trust besides concentrating it into a central server.

The email is real and documented. But in April 2009 there was no XRP, no XRP Ledger and no company called Ripple. If you share the email as proof that Satoshi backed XRP, the video warns, anyone who checks the date will win that argument. Shared accurately, it says something more modest: of the alternatives around in 2009, the one Satoshi singled out was the idea the XRP Ledger later took its name from.

When was the XRP Ledger actually born?

The XRP Ledger was built in 2011 and 2012, after Bitcoin. Three engineers, Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto and David Schwartz, started working on it. According to the video, the forum thread that kicked it off on Bitcointalk was titled “Bitcoin without mining,” and the XRP Ledger’s own history page says the three were fascinated by Bitcoin and wanted to build something better.

Their main goal, Schwartz says in an interview shown in the video, was to replace proof of work, the energy-intensive mining process that secures Bitcoin. His explanation is simple:

1. To stop the same money being spent twice, you don’t need miners. You need everyone to agree on the order of transactions.
2. If two payments try to spend the same coins, the first one wins and the other fails.
3. Every few seconds, the computers running the ledger compare which transactions to include in the current round and which to push to the next.
4. They agree on the list, sort it and move on.

There is no mining and no large electricity bill, and a new ledger closes in a few seconds. According to the video, that is why an XRP payment settles in seconds while a Bitcoin payment can take longer to confirm.

The team needed a name. Schwartz says Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb acquired RipplePay from Fugger for the name and brand; other accounts say Fugger handed the project over after talking it through with his community. Either way, he agreed, and the new team rebuilt the technology from scratch with a new digital asset: XRP.

The ledger that was never meant to be the real one

The ledger holding XRP today exists because the developers stopped deleting it. During development, the team changed the code constantly, pushed it to test servers and wiped the ledger whenever a change broke compatibility. Schwartz says that around June 2012 there was no longer a technical need to reset, so they simply stopped.

In his words from the video, the live ledger “was not special when it was created.” It was one of thousands the team created and destroyed.

A few more details from the video:

• The premine. The ledger started with 100 billion XRP already in it. According to the ledger’s history, the founders gave 80 billion of that to the company that became Ripple, set up with Chris Larsen in September 2012. Schwartz says that XRP was “literally worthless” at the time. Whether the allocation was fair is still argued; Schwartz’s case is that whoever builds a system sets its rules, though he says the truth sits somewhere in the middle.
• The open Genesis account. When the ledger opened to the public in beta, the master account still held XRP. Anyone connecting to the software could take some, and people took what they needed to experiment. Some of them still hold it.
• You can rebuild the starting point. Schwartz says that if you run the XRP Ledger software on your own computer without connecting to the network, it builds a new ledger with 100 billion XRP in its first account. The only thing that makes the real one valuable is that thousands of people agreed to use it.

How the 2004 idea lives on in your wallet

The code and the coin were new, but Fugger’s idea survived as trust lines. A trust line tells the ledger who you trust to hold an IOU for you, and how much. If you have held RLUSD on the XRP Ledger, you had to set a trust line to its issuer first.

Fugger noticed the connection himself. According to the video, in October 2015, when Ripple’s engineers were building a payment protocol called Interledger, he wrote that it closely resembled what he had been aiming for in 2004.

XRP fills a gap in Fugger’s design. Chains of trust break: if no path of trusting people connects you to the person you are paying, his system could not pay them. The new ledger added a neutral asset anyone can hold without trusting anyone. Its built-in exchange can even route a trade through XRP automatically when that is cheaper, which the documentation calls auto-bridging.

The three dates at a glance

Date	What it is	Does it involve XRP?
1988	A patent for a distributed “computer system”	No
2004	Ryan Fugger’s idea of money made of promises, launched as RipplePay in 2005	No coin; it gave Ripple its name
2012	The XRP Ledger, the version the team stopped resetting	Yes

What to check next

The video’s broader lesson goes beyond one graphic. Every market cycle, a story like the 1988 one circulates and feels like inside knowledge. People buy because of it, and when someone knocks it down, those whose position rested on the story tend to panic. The question the host suggests asking first: if this story turned out to be wrong, would I still want to hold?

When the next origin story or “secret history” post appears, check the dates and open the primary documents: the patent itself, the email’s date, the XRP Ledger’s own history page. In this case the real story is more interesting than the myth.