Altcoins News
By James Thorp
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A newly resurfaced document has reignited debate in the crypto community: is Ripple actually older than Bitcoin?
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The conversation, which dates back to 2014, features several key figures in the crypto space, including journalist Reutzel Bailey, who claimed that Ripple's original concept…
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This revelation has stirred curiosity, but it also raises an important question: if Ripple was conceptualized before Bitcoin, why isn’t it considered the first cryptocurrency?
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According to Bailey, the initial idea behind Ripple was introduced by Ryan Fugger in 2004. Fugger’s goal was to build a decentralized payment system—RipplePay—to enable people to…
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While the platform was innovative, it didn’t gain mainstream attention until much later. That push, according to Bailey, came from Chris Larsen, Ripple’s co-founder, who helped…
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“I think Larsen pushed this [Ripple] as a cryptocurrency to catch attention because the platform itself was not really about cryptocurrency at all,” Bailey remarked in the email…
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Another contributor to the email thread, Jeffrey Cliff, emphasized that Ripple wasn’t merely a Bitcoin copycat, arguing instead that it predates Bitcoin entirely.
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While that statement holds some truth, it’s important to draw a distinction: although the Ripple concept was born earlier, the cryptocurrency we now know as XRP wasn’t started…
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2004: Ryan Fugger start RipplePay as a decentralized payment network.
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2008: Satoshi Nakamoto publishes the Bitcoin whitepaper.
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2009: Bitcoin's blockchain goes live, and the first coins are mined.
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2011: Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, and David Schwartz begin developing what becomes the XRP Ledger (XRPL).
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2012: Ripple starts as a crypto company under the name NewCoin, later OpenCoin, and eventually Ripple. XRP is created.
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Despite its earlier origins, Ripple’s transition into the cryptocurrency world didn’t take shape until after Bitcoin had already redefined digital finance.
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The XRP Ledger, developed by McCaleb and his team, was designed to improve on Bitcoin’s limitations—particularly its use of the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, which…
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