XRP Was Not Created by Ryan Fugger: Ripple's David Schwartz Sets the Record Straight

A long-standing myth in the crypto community has finally been addressed head-on. David Schwartz, Ripple's CTO Emeritus, has officially clarified the origins of XRP, dismissing persistent claims that Canadian developer Ryan Fugger is the token's creator. The confusion stems from a project called RipplePay, which Fugger launched back in 2004 — a full five years before Bitcoin entered the scene. Due to the shared name, many have incorrectly assumed a direct connection between that early payment system and today's XRP ecosystem.

Schwartz took to social media on June 26, 2026, to lay out the actual timeline of events. He explained that Fugger's 2004 RipplePay was a straightforward trust-based payment network with no blockchain component and no native digital assets. It operated on the principle of mutual credit between users — an innovative idea for its time, but fundamentally different from what XRP represents today.

The real story of XRP begins in 2012, when entrepreneurs Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb purchased the RipplePay platform from Fugger. Their interest was purely in the brand name and its recognition — not the underlying technology. The technical foundation was entirely discarded. From that point, engineers Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, and David Schwartz built the XRP Ledger and the XRP token from the ground up, writing every line of code fresh. In other words, only the name survived from Fugger's original vision.

Schwartz's clarification comes at a time when conspiracy theories about XRP's origins have been resurfacing across social platforms. One particularly persistent narrative ties Schwartz himself to the mysterious identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, pointing to patents he filed between 1988 and 1991 related to distributed computing. Some XRP supporters have gone further, using these documents as supposed evidence that the token was secretly engineered under U.S. government direction.

Schwartz firmly rejected these interpretations. He noted that his patents from over three decades ago reflect technologies that are now thoroughly outdated and bear no technical relevance to the XRP Ledger's current architecture. Attempts to link those early filings — or Fugger's pre-Bitcoin payment experiment — to the birth of XRP, according to Schwartz, amount to nothing more than forcing unrelated facts into a compelling but fictional narrative.

The engineer's position is clear and unambiguous: XRP's history starts in 2012, with a codebase written entirely from scratch by a defined group of developers. There are no hidden founders, no secret government projects, and no connection to work done in the late 1980s or early 2000s.

This kind of origin myth is not uncommon in the crypto world, where decentralization and anonymity often fuel speculation. However, when one of the actual architects of a technology steps forward with a direct account of events, it carries significant weight. Schwartz's statement is a reminder that the real history of XRP is well-documented — and far less mysterious than the theories suggest.