Was XRP created before Bitcoin? David Schwartz responds

Ripple CTO emeritus David Schwartz has pushed back on a fresh social media debate over whether XRP existed before Bitcoin

Summary

• Schwartz said Fugger’s 2004 idea was a payment network, not XRP or decentralized assets.
• XRPL history places XRP’s creation in 2012, years after Bitcoin launched in 2009 officially.
• The debate shows how older RipplePay ideas still drive confusion around XRP’s real origin.

The exchange began after Crypto Dyl News claimed on X that “Bitcoin was NOT the 1st” and that XRP was created in 1988.

That claim drew a question from XRP community user MitchRob, who asked Schwartz whether Ryan Fugger had conceptualized XRP and the XRP Ledger before or after Bitcoin. Schwartz replied that Fugger had conceptualized a decentralized payment and settlement network around 2004, well before Bitcoin.

Schwartz added one key limit to that answer. He said Fugger’s idea did not include decentralized assets. That distinction separates RipplePay, Fugger’s early payment concept, from XRP and the XRP Ledger, which arrived later.

Ryan Fugger built RipplePay, not XRP

Fugger’s RipplePay concept dates back to 2004. It focused on payments, IOUs and trust lines between users. It did not operate as a blockchain in the modern crypto sense, and it did not include XRP as a native asset.

Ryan Fugger conceptualized a decentralized payment/settlement network (but without decentralized assets) around 2004, well before bitcoin.

— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) June 26, 2026

Schwartz’s answer makes that point clear. He wrote that Fugger conceptualized a decentralized payment and settlement network “but without decentralized assets” around 2004. That means the idea came before Bitcoin, but XRP itself did not.

The official XRP Ledger history page places XRP’s launch in 2012. It says Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto built a distributed ledger that aimed to improve on Bitcoin’s limits. The ledger included a native asset that became XRP.

The XRPL learning portal also says the three developers joined forces in 2011 to create a faster and more scalable digital asset. That timeline puts XRP after Bitcoin, not before it.

XRP origin debate continues online

MitchRob later asked whether Satoshi Nakamoto may have drawn any inspiration from Fugger’s earlier concepts. He also asked which network was built with a better framework for payments and settlement.

Schwartz had not answered that follow-up in the provided thread at the time of writing. The question remains speculative because no public evidence in the thread shows that Satoshi used Fugger’s work when designing Bitcoin.

The confusion comes from the Ripple name. Fugger’s RipplePay project came before Bitcoin, while the XRP Ledger came after Bitcoin. Ripple Labs later used the Ripple name, but the technical system behind XRP was built separately.

As previously reported, David Schwartz recently explained his XRP Ledger role after stepping back from daily leadership. The report noted that he remains CTO emeritus and one of XRPL’s co-creators.

XRPL history still matters

The debate comes as XRP Ledger development continues. In a previous article, crypto.news discussed Schwartz backing the XRP Ledger 3.2.0 upgrade, which renamed the core server software from rippled to xrpld.

That update moved XRPL further away from older Ripple-branded software names. It also added cleanup fixes for features tied to DeFi tools, vaults, lending, permissioned domains and token functions.

Previously, crypto.news explored XRPL’s growing tokenized finance use cases. Schwartz said XRPL use is expanding from payments into tokenized assets, stablecoins and other financial tools.

The latest exchange does not change XRP’s history. Fugger helped shape an early payment idea before Bitcoin. XRP and XRPL, however, began later as separate code written by Schwartz, McCaleb and Britto.