I recently reviewed the history of Ripple and was surprised to discover how it all began. It turns out that Ryan Fugger, a web developer from Vancouver, had the vision back in 2004 to create a fully decentralized digital monetary system. This type was truly ahead of its time.

The first version of his project was called RipplePay, launched in 2005. The idea was quite revolutionary for the time: allowing individuals and communities to create their own virtual currencies easily. Ryan Fugger envisioned a world where secure payments could occur without intermediaries.

But here’s where the story gets interesting. In 2012, two key figures in the fintech world approached Ryan Fugger: Jed McCaleb, who came from the eDonkey network, and Chris Larsen, an entrepreneur who had already founded E-Loan and Prosper. These two had a different proposal. They wanted to improve Ryan Fugger’s original idea with an innovative concept: a consensus-based verification system among network members, something completely different from Bitcoin’s mining.

Ryan Fugger decided to hand over the project. McCaleb and Larsen renamed the company OpenCoin and developed a new payment protocol called Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP), based on the foundations Ryan Fugger had established years earlier.

From 2012 onward, the Ripple team deployed its own blockchain. The goal was clear: to offer payment solutions for banks and financial institutions. Simultaneously, they created XRP, the native cryptocurrency of this blockchain, which also served to store all accounting information of the participants.

In 2013, OpenCoin changed its name to Ripple Labs. The company began launching several experimental projects. For example, in 2014, they introduced Codius, which aimed to develop smart contracts. Finally, in 2015, the company simply adopted the name Ripple, consolidating the vision Ryan Fugger had started a decade earlier.