Who created XRP, and the card-trading detour on the way
XRP's story starts with a 2004 idea about trust between friends, passes through three engineers, and takes one very strange detour through a collectible-card website. Here is who actually built it.
Before there was XRP, there was a man named Ryan Fugger and a simple idea: money does not need a bank, it needs trust. In 2004 he built a small network called RipplePay, where people extended IOUs to friends they trusted and those IOUs could be passed along. It had no blockchain and no coin. It was money as a favor between neighbors, in the most literal sense.
That project never became XRP, and Fugger did not invent the token. But his work matters because of what it left behind: the name. That name, Ripple, is where one of crypto's strangest origin stories begins.
Three engineers and a forum post
Seven years later, three engineers decided Bitcoin had a problem. David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto thought mining was wasteful, so they set out to build a ledger that could settle payments without it. In May 2011 McCaleb opened a thread on the BitcoinTalk forum titled, plainly, 'Bitcoin without mining.'
They started writing code that year and launched the XRP Ledger in June 2012. All 100 billion XRP were created at that launch, and the three founders made a decision that still shapes the token today: they gifted 80 billion of them, 80 percent of the entire supply, to the company they were forming. Chris Larsen joined right after the launch and became its chief executive.
The card-game detour
Now for the part nobody expects. Jed McCaleb, one of those three engineers, had a previous life. In 2007 he set up a website for trading Magic: The Gathering cards, and he gave it a name that was an acronym for 'Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange.' The site was called Mt. Gox.
The card site never took off, so McCaleb let the domain sit idle. In 2010, after reading about Bitcoin, he repurposed it into a Bitcoin exchange, and on its first day it reportedly enabled trades of about twenty bitcoins, at around five cents each. He sold the exchange in 2011 to a developer named Mark Karpelès. It later collapsed in the industry's most famous hack, long after McCaleb had walked away and moved on to Ripple, and later to Stellar, a rival network.
Read that arc again. One person built a card-trading site, turned it into Bitcoin's first real exchange, then co-created XRP, then founded a whole separate rival network. The through-line is a guy who keeps building the next version of a better way to move money.
What survived
The origin story has one soft spot that still gets argued about. In 2012 Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb acquired RipplePay from Ryan Fugger, but only, in the words of Ripple's longtime chief technology officer David Schwartz, for the name. Schwartz has said plainly that the XRP Ledger was new code built from scratch, and that only the Ripple brand survived from Fugger's 2004 project.
He is careful about this because it matters to him. Fugger's RipplePay was a trust network between people, not a blockchain. Schwartz, McCaleb, and Britto built something different, a shared ledger with its own token, and Schwartz has spent years politely correcting anyone who collapses the two together.
A name that stuck
Even the token's name has a small charm to it. The asset was first called 'ripples,' with the currency code XRP, and over time the community simply started calling it by its code. Today almost nobody says 'ripples.' They say XRP, four letters that now sit atop one of the most valuable networks in crypto.
So who created XRP? Three engineers with a shared complaint about wasted electricity, plus a chief executive who joined right after launch, plus a name borrowed from a 2004 trust experiment. And a card-game website, of all things, sitting in the middle of the résumé. It is a strange, winding origin, and it is exactly the kind of story a price chart never tells you.
Sources
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