In his latest publication, Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz put an end to the years-long debate around the history of the cryptocurrency’s creation, officially refuting rumors that Canadian programmer Ryan Fugger is the creator of the $XRP token. The reason for these speculations remains the RipplePay project, which Fugger launched in 2004 — five years before the appearance of Bitcoin.
Because of the similar name, many people still mistakenly consider the Canadian programmer the “father” of $XRP.
True history behind the $XRP Ledger architecture
Schwartz restores the real chronology of events and explains that Fugger’s original 2004 project was an ordinary payment system based on mutual trust between users, where there was no blockchain and no digital coins. The real history of the cryptocurrency begins only in 2012, when Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb acquired the RipplePay platform from Fugger.
The OpenCoin team, later known as Ripple Labs, did this solely for the memorable name and the brand itself, completely replacing the technical core. Engineers Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto and David Schwartz then wrote the code from scratch, creating the XRPL ledger and the $XRP token — meaning that only the name remains from Fugger’s old system today.
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 statement comes against the backdrop of another wave of conspiracy theories on social media. The roots of these rumors lie in David Schwartz’s real patents for distributed computing, which he filed back in 1988–1991.
Because of these documents, Schwartz has long been considered a candidate for the role of Satoshi Nakamoto, while radical $XRP supporters use them as “proof” that the coin was secretly created by order of the U.S. government.
Schwartz, however, emphasizes that his archival developments from the late 1980s are technologically outdated and have nothing to do with the modern architecture of the $XRP Ledger. According to the engineer, attempts to connect either his patents or Fugger’s old project with the birth of the token are merely an effort to fit facts into attractive theories.
The real history of $XRP begins only in 2012, with code written from scratch, and any attempts to look for “secret creators” before that moment have no technical meaning.
