XRP Origins Clarified: Ripple's David Schwartz Debunks Ryan Fugger Myth Once and For All

For years, a persistent misconception has circulated across crypto communities worldwide — the idea that Canadian programmer Ryan Fugger somehow stands at the origin of XRP. Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has now stepped forward to officially dismantle that narrative, providing a clear and detailed account of how XRP actually came to be.

The confusion traces back to a project called RipplePay, which Fugger launched in 2004 — a full five years before Bitcoin's debut. Because the name closely resembles that of Ripple, many observers drew a direct line between Fugger's early work and the digital asset known today as XRP. According to Schwartz, however, that connection is purely superficial.

In a post published on June 26, 2026, Schwartz explained that Fugger's 2004 platform was fundamentally different from anything in today's blockchain ecosystem. RipplePay operated as a basic peer-to-peer payment network built on user trust relationships — there was no distributed ledger, no cryptographic token, and no blockchain architecture of any kind. It was, in essence, a digital IOU system, not a cryptocurrency.

The actual story of XRP begins in 2012, when entrepreneurs Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb purchased the RipplePay platform from Fugger. Their interest was not in its technology — it was in the brand recognition the name carried. The team operating under the name OpenCoin, which would later become Ripple Labs, completely dismantled the original technical infrastructure and replaced it with an entirely new system built from the ground up.

Engineers Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, and David Schwartz were responsible for writing the code behind the XRP Ledger from scratch. The result was the XRPL — a high-speed, energy-efficient distributed ledger — and XRP, the native digital asset that powers it. In Schwartz's own words, the only thing inherited from Fugger's project was the name itself.

Schwartz's clarification also addressed a separate but related wave of conspiracy theories that has been gaining traction on social media. At the center of these theories are patents for distributed computing systems that Schwartz filed between 1988 and 1991. These documents have long fueled speculation that Schwartz might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. More extreme voices in the XRP community have gone further, claiming the patents prove XRP was secretly engineered at the direction of the U.S. government.

Schwartz firmly rejected both claims. He noted that his patents from the late 1980s reflect technologies that are now decades out of date and bear no technical relationship to the modern XRP Ledger architecture. Attempting to link those early documents to today's cryptocurrency, he argued, is an exercise in narrative construction rather than factual analysis.

The engineer's core message was straightforward: XRP was born in 2012, coded entirely from scratch by a known team of developers. Any attempt to push its origins further back — whether to Fugger's 2004 payment network or Schwartz's 1980s patents — lacks technical foundation and serves only to support theories built around coincidence rather than evidence.

As speculation around crypto origins continues to thrive online, Schwartz's direct intervention provides one of the clearest official accounts yet of how the XRP Ledger and its native token actually came into existence.