I just read the history of Ripple, and honestly, it's quite interesting how all of this started.

It turns out that everything began in 2004 when Ryan Fugger, a web developer from Vancouver, had a different vision of how digital money should work. Ryan Fugger imagined a decentralized monetary system where people and communities could easily create their own virtual currencies. He launched what he called RipplePay in 2005, focused on facilitating secure payments worldwide.

But here’s where it gets interesting. In 2012, two key figures approached Ryan Fugger with a revolutionary proposal: Jed McCaleb, who came from the eDonkey world, and Chris Larsen, founder of E-Loan and Prosper. These two had a different idea: to create a digital currency that used consensus among network members instead of mining like Bitcoin. Ryan Fugger saw the potential and handed them the project.

McCaleb and Larsen renamed the company to OpenCoin and developed a new payment protocol based on what Ryan Fugger had created, called Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP). The idea was clear: payment solutions for banks and financial institutions.

Since 2012, the team deployed its own blockchain for exchange services across multiple currency pairs. That’s where XRP, the native cryptocurrency, was born. In 2013, OpenCoin became Ripple Labs and started launching various projects. They even experimented with Codius in 2014 to develop smart contracts. Finally, in 2015, the company adopted the name Ripple that we know today.

Ryan Fugger’s vision of a decentralized monetary system truly laid the groundwork for what Ripple became. It’s one of those cases where an initial idea evolved into something much bigger thanks to collaboration and innovation.