Origins and Founding

How the XRP Ledger and the company now known as Ripple came to be, from the RipplePay precursor through OpenCoin.

Before XRP: RipplePay

The name "Ripple" predates XRP by nearly a decade. In 2004, developer Ryan Fugger created RipplePay, an early system for community-based, trust-network credit and payments — the idea that people who trust each other could route IOUs through a chain of intermediaries without needing a bank in the middle. RipplePay was not a blockchain (blockchains did not exist yet) and did not involve any token, but it introduced the core conceptual idea — decentralized, trust-based payment routing — that would later carry over into the XRP Ledger's own trust-line system.

The creation of the XRP Ledger

In 2011–2012, engineers David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto designed and built the XRP Ledger from scratch as a faster, less energy-intensive alternative to Bitcoin's proof-of-work model. Rather than mining, the new ledger used a consensus process among trusted validating nodes. All 100 billion XRP that will ever exist were created at this genesis moment — there is no ongoing issuance.

OpenCoin and the founding of the company

In September 2012, the creators partnered with entrepreneur Chris Larsen to found OpenCoin, a company built to develop the XRP Ledger's ecosystem and, eventually, commercial payment products around it. As part of this arrangement, a large share of the pre-existing XRP supply was gifted to the company to fund its operations and development — this is the origin of the large XRP holdings Ripple still has today (see Ripple's XRP Holdings).

From OpenCoin to Ripple Labs

OpenCoin rebranded as Ripple Labs in 2013, adopting the "Ripple" name from Fugger's earlier project (with Fugger's involvement and endorsement) and shifting its public focus toward what would become RippleNet — a network aimed at banks and payment providers for cross-border settlement. The company has since been known simply as Ripple. See Name History for the full sequence of renames, and Corporate History for how the business evolved from there.