David Schwartz, who served for many years as Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer and now holds the title of CTO Emeritus, has issued a direct response to longstanding debates over the origins of XRP. Schwartz categorically denied claims that Canadian developer Ryan Fugger created the XRP token.
RipplePay at the center of the debate
At the heart of these claims lies the RipplePay system, established by Fugger in 2004. Launched five years before Bitcoin, RipplePay’s similar name led some in the crypto community to incorrectly credit Fugger as the founder of XRP. In his latest comments, Schwartz emphasized that this perception is not accurate from either a technical or historical perspective.
According to Schwartz, XRP’s true history began in 2012, and any effort to trace a “hidden founder” back to earlier times lacks technical basis.
Schwartz outlined that Fugger’s 2004 RipplePay initiative was an ordinary payment system based on mutual trust between users. This system had neither a blockchain foundation nor a digital coin. The technical underpinnings associated with XRP emerged only in 2012, after Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb acquired the RipplePay platform from Fugger.
Emphasis on building the code from scratch
Schwartz explained that the team—later known as OpenCoin and eventually Ripple Labs—acquired RipplePay mainly for its brand value and memorable name, not for its technology. He stressed that the technical infrastructure was completely rebuilt. Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, and David Schwartz wrote entirely new code to develop the XRP Ledger (XRPL) and XRP token. The consensus is that only the name survived from the old system.
Ripple is widely recognized for its cross-border payment technologies. The XRP Ledger stands out as the open-source, distributed system that supports XRP. Schwartz’s statement was issued as conspiracy theories regarding the origins of XRP resurfaced on social media.
Old patents reignited rumors
Some of these theories cited Schwartz’s distributed computing patent applications filed between 1988 and 1991. These documents have led to periodic speculation that Schwartz could be Satoshi Nakamoto, the enigmatic creator of Bitcoin. Even further, certain XRP supporters have pointed to these patents as supposed evidence that the coin was secretly developed under the influence of the US government.
Mini glossary: Distributed computing refers to systems in which transaction and data processing workloads are shared across multiple computers, rather than being handled by a single central entity. Although this concept shares some similarities with modern blockchain structures, early distributed computing patents alone do not represent a direct foundation for today’s crypto networks.
Schwartz rejected these interpretations, arguing that his late-1980s developments are technologically outdated and unrelated to the modern architecture of XRP Ledger. As he explained, the efforts to link his own patents or Fugger’s earlier project to the birth of XRP simply fit available facts into appealing narratives.
With this recent clarification, Schwartz reaffirmed that XRP’s origins date to 2012. He reiterated that the token’s creation was based on new code and a completely reimagined technical structure; earlier claims to founding are regarded as historical curiosities rather than technically valid arguments.
