A recently surfaced document questions the commonly accepted timeline of Ripple and Bitcoin, claiming that the idea of Ripple was conceived in 2004.
Origins of Ripple
According to information shared by XRP community member SMOQE, a 2014 email exchange among industry insiders suggested that Ripple was conceived in 2004, four years before Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin's white paper in 2008. In this exchange, tech journalist Reutzel Bailey stated that Ryan Fugger designed RipplePay, a platform aimed at enabling peer-to-peer value transfer without the use of traditional banking systems.
Emergence of XRP Ledger
While the concept of Ripple emerged in 2004, the cryptocurrency XRP was introduced in 2012, four years after Bitcoin's public debut. Developers Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, and David Schwartz started working on the XRP Ledger in 2011, seeking to create a more efficient system that addressed Bitcoin's limitations, particularly its reliance on the proof-of-work consensus mechanism.
Comparison with Bitcoin
Despite Ripple's historical roots being older than Bitcoin, BTC remains the first and foremost cryptocurrency, launched by Satoshi. Ripple's developers altered the original concept of RipplePay to create a crypto network, which ultimately led to the formation of XRP. After departing from Ripple, McCaleb agreed to gradually liquidate his XRP holdings, completing this process in 2022.
Thus, the revelation about Ripple's earlier emergence raises questions regarding the history and evolution of cryptocurrencies as a whole, as well as the differences in their purposes and applications.
