The Real FuzzyBear

There is a token on the XRP Ledger called FUZZY, named after him. Its description is not marketing copy on a website that can be quietly changed — it is published in the token's own xrp-ledger.toml, the file the ledger's own standard uses to let a project state who it is. It reads, in full:

The transaction it names is real. It is in the wallet FuzzyBear claimed from Ripple's 2013 giveaway (the 50,000 XRP arrived in 83D89E757D79…), the timestamp matches to the second, and you can open it: 0D064928D60E…, ledger 4,191,772. He really did offer 1 XRP for 1 BTC at 13:28:30 UTC on 1 January 2014.

Here is that transaction together with the six that follow it, which the description does not mention.

One hundred seconds after asking a whole bitcoin for a single XRP, the same account offered XRP at 0.00003592 bitcoin each — about 27,841 times less. Fifteen minutes after that it was converting XRP into bitcoin, and half an hour after that the bitcoin was leaving the ledger for an exchange. The cited order offered just 1 XRP — a single unit, a trivial amount — and nobody ever took it.

Over those three days the account signed 31 transactions, all of them part of the same job, and converted 54,320.61 of its 60,000 XRP into bitcoin — that figure is the wallet's own balance on 1 January minus its balance after the last transaction of 3 January. It came back once, on 27 November 2014, to sell the remainder (FB5881D646B1…); its last standing order filled on 9 December (48659D7C3086…); and its final signature — a bitcoin withdrawal on 24 February 2015 (AFF96E32537F…) — closed the account's active life at 59,964.93 XRP sold and 2.0839 BTC withdrawn. It has signed nothing since.

A widely-shared thread went through the same 1,421 posts and reached the opposite conclusion — that XRP appears exactly once, as a single faucet claim (a free giveaway handout of XRP), and nothing else. That is the one place it slips, and it slips in an interesting way. XRP appears in 25 posts, all between 7 February 2013 and 29 April 2013. Here is where they are.

The single post in the giveaway thread is the faucet claim the thread found, and it stopped there. The fifteen posts above it are FuzzyBear organising, funding and delivering two large pizzas paid for with 10,000 XRP — a deliberate restaging of the bitcoin pizza, with photographs, and as far as anyone has shown the first time XRP bought a physical thing. Whatever else he was, he was not a man who claimed a faucet drop and walked away.

Everything else that thread says about him holds up. He was a British hobbyist called Peter — bitcointalk user 58607, the name he introduced himself with on his first day and signed off with for years afterwards, usually above his own bitcoin address. He found bitcoin in 2012 and spent two years mining it and building small things around it. His real subject was never Ripple. Counted over the same 1,421 posts:

He wrote the guides that told strangers how to earn Devcoin by writing, and how to build its wallet from source. He created the wiki accounts people needed before they could be paid, until he was, in his words, “little swamped with all the activation request accounts”. He wrote a Peercoin wallet for Windows, shipped it with a changelog, and hosted the downloads on peercointalk.org himself. There is a fuller profile of him, and the whole pizza story, in the pizza article.

And his world had a center, which was not Ripple's. His GitHub follows exactly fourteen accounts: Sunny King — the pseudonymous creator of both Peercoin and Primecoin — the physical-Bitcoin maker Casascius, and a dozen Peercoin core developers. Not one of the fourteen is from Ripple or the XRP world. His bitcointalk signature for years was three words — “Earn DEV at devtome.com” — pointing at the Devcoin writing wiki he helped run; and when he wanted a coin of his own, he wrote one: doubloons, billed in its own README as “a cryptocurrency for the pirates among us.”

And the raw counts show where his attention actually went. He wrote 1,421 posts on bitcointalk — and 1,446 more on the Peercoin forum, almost exactly as many, plus 158 topics of his own. His repositories run well past his own coins — a Bitcoin-ATM interface, an atomic-swap wallet, a ZeroNet fork, a Peercoin crowdfunding site — and he wrote how-to guides for the Devcoin wiki, on installing Primecoin and importing paper wallets, the kind that paid their authors in DVC. For a man later cast as an XRP prophet, the paper trail is almost entirely Peercoin, Devcoin and bitcoin.

Those are the subjects; here is their shape across time — every place he kept a public record, on one axis. The wallet lane starts on 21 February 2013, when a Ripple 2013 distribution wallet activated his account with a 50,000 XRP giveaway claim (83D89E757D79…) — one of thousands of accounts that same wallet funded into existence. The token's origin story opens “Opencoin activated a wallet named Fuzzybear,” as though he were chosen; the chain shows a routine claim, and then a decade of building on everything but XRP.

Four platforms, thirteen years, and XRP appears on none of them after the spring of 2013. He did not disappear: he was last seen logging into bitcointalk in December 2025 — eleven months after the token launched in his name — and his GitHub account was still active into 2026. That is what makes the quiet loud. When FUZZY arrived in January 2025 (the amber line above), the man it commemorates was still reachable on four channels, and used none of them to say a word about it.

The claim that he foresaw XRP overtaking bitcoin needs him to have believed in something. He did — just not that. He was a proof-of-stake man, and he was consistently sour on hype:

In 1,421 posts he never predicts one coin overtaking another and never writes the word bearableguy123. Those are not gaps in our reading. They are counts, and anyone can repeat them.

He also has an X account — @FuzzybearBTC, joined 30 November 2013, location UK — and its content ties itself to the forum record without any help from the handle: it links peercointalk.org, the forum he hosted his own wallet builds on; it argues “#Peercoin was the first POS coin”; it trades “my DVC #Devcoin”; and it signs up to a staking pool under the referral name Fuzzybear. Same man, same convictions, second platform.

His GitHub account goes further, because code leaves artifacts. Opened in January 2013, its profile fields read — in his own words — name Peter Drake(matching the “Hello I am Peter” he introduced himself with on the forum), company Peercoin, website peercointalk.org. Its 105 public repositories, 2013 to 2021, are Terracoin, Peercoin, Devcoin, Primecoin and bitcoin wallet work — and not one is for XRP or Ripple. One repository is proof-grade: on 2 February 2013 he posted on bitcointalk that he had set up a test WordPress store for the Terracoin bounty — and terracoin-wp-e-commerce was created on this GitHub account the same day, at 06:42 UTC. Even his SoundCloud — username FuzzyBearBTC, registered under the same name — fits the man who once tried to build btc-music.com.

And there is proof they are one person and not a family resemblance. He keeps a Keybase identity — keybase.io/fuzzybear — and Keybase makes you post a cryptographically signed statement from an account before it will list one. His carries three live proofs, binding the same handle — fuzzybearbtc — on Twitter, GitHub and Reddit. This is not us matching writing styles; it is him signing for all three. That handle is his signature everywhere: FuzzyBearBTC on X, GitHub, Reddit, Steemit, SoundCloud, YouTube and Telegram, shortened to FuzzyBear on the forums. And the work under it points the same way — one of his repositories forks the Coinomi multi-coin wallet, whose README lists the coins it carries: “Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Peercoin, Darkcoin, Reddcoin, NuBits and NuShares.” Eight coins, and XRP not one of them.

One honest caveat before the numbers: X's search returns only 84 of the profile's 1,859 posts — the rest are retweets and old posts its index does not serve — so every “zero” below means zero across everything searchable, which is as far as anyone outside X can see.

With that said: his bio today names five coins — “BTC, ETH, LRC, LTC, XLM” — and XRP is not one of them. His feed is GameStop and Peercoin: across the 84 searchable posts the ticker GME appears forty-one times and Peercoin seven, while XRP, Ripple, the pizza and the FUZZY token appear zero— and the only “ripple” in any of them is the word hiding inside tripled. He tags @TheRoaringKitty, not anyone at Ripple. His last searchable post is November 2023, two years before the token existed; the last activity of any kind is a GameStop retweet from May 2025.

That chart is the token community discovering him. Nine people tagged the account in 2021; in 2025 — starting seventeen days after the FUZZY launch — it was tagged 245 times, and 2026 has passed 300 before September. One of them asked him directly: “I think $FUZZY was created in commemoration of your wallet from 2013… Can you give us some insight into the wallet creation?” No answer — to that or to anything else. It is the same picture his wallet shows: strangers sending 0.123 XRP of dust at an address that stopped signing in 2015, and strangers tagging an account that stopped posting about crypto years ago. In July 2026 one of them minted a Fuzzybear #1453 NFT and directed a free offer of it straight at the wallet (D341F10E7AEC…); it will sit unclaimed, because accepting it needs a signature the wallet has not produced in eleven years. The commemoration has, so far, been affectionately one-way.

Put everything above on one line and the distance the label crosses becomes visible. His entire XRP life — all 25 posts, the giveaway, the pizza — fits inside three months of 2013. The order the token quotes came the following New Year's Day, in the same hour the selling started. The token itself arrived on 23 January 2025: ten years after the wallet's last signature, and almost twelve after his last word about XRP.

The lore is older than the token — by years. On 16 August 2021, three and a half years before FUZZY launched, an XRP-riddle account, @HowardMoon589 (the 589nods to BearableGuy123's prophesied $589 price), posted a single wordless image: black sunglasses on a field of blue ripples, and the word BOOM. No caption, no explanation.

Two things are hidden inside it, and both resolve to exactly one wallet — FuzzyBear's. A near-invisible QR code, navy on blue, carries the wallet's address; a line of hex printed along the top edge is the wallet's 2013 activation transaction. Pulled out by hand, they line up like this:

It is the earliest sign I could find of the XRP community adopting FuzzyBear's 2013 wallet into its living lore — a full three and a half years before anyone minted a token in his name. The legend it draws on is itself younger than the wallet: BearableGuy123, whose $589 the handle echoes, only surfaced around 2017, four years after FuzzyBear's brief XRP moment had already passed. And it has the same gentle shape as everything that followed: the community reached for his wallet, and he simply never reached back. A quiet piece of XRPL folklore, hiding in plain sight since 2021.

By the next year the shorthand was doing real work. In July 2022 a widely-followed XRP account, @XRPee3 (34,700 followers), told them “If you own just 1000 XRP you're gonna be just fine” — and when a follower asked why, the whole answer was two words: “Fuzzy bear.” The 2014 order had become a one-line article of faith, two and a half years before a token turned it into a ticker.

Claim by claim, against the same post history:

Two readings of the same man, pointing in opposite directions. One turns him into somebody who barely noticed XRP; the other turns him into a prophet of it. He was neither. He was an altcoin hobbyist who claimed a free 50,000 XRP, spent 10,000 of it buying a stranger two pizzas because he liked being part of a first, and sold the rest a year later for two bitcoin.

xrpl.to lists the FUZZY token, which holds one of our paid verification tiers, and we publish a separate page about it. This piece is meant as a factual record — the history behind one of the XRP Ledger's top trending meme tokens, and the real person whose name it carries — built entirely from public forum posts and on-chain transactions, every figure linked so anyone can check it. If something here needs correcting, tell us and we will fix it; our aim is to add to the FuzzyBear lore, not to settle it. And for the record, the commemorated 2013 wallet and the token's issuer share no on-chain connection across the wallet's entire 193-transaction history — the token stands as a tribute to a piece of early XRPL history, a decade removed from it.

Nothing here needs special access.

1. The posts. His whole history is public at his bitcointalk profile — 1,421 posts across 72 pages. Every count above is a count of those, and every thread in the chart links to itself.
2. The token's description. Open its xrp-ledger.toml and read the desc field for issuer rhCAT4hRdi2Y9puNdkpMzxrdKa5wkppR62. It is quoted above in full.
3. The transactions. Every row in the table links to the transaction itself. Or open rjh37Ura… and read 1 January 2014 for yourself. The account signed only 39 transactions in its entire life, so there is not much to read.
4. The X account. Type from:FuzzybearBTC XRP into X's search: nothing comes back. Then type from:FuzzybearBTC peercoin and his Peercoin posts appear — which is how you know the empty result means something.
5. The GitHub. Open github.com/FuzzyBearBTC and read the repository list: 105 of them, none for XRP.
6. The Keybase. Open keybase.io/fuzzybear and read the proofs — the same person signs for fuzzybearbtc on Twitter, GitHub and Reddit. That is the handle, and that is the man.

More like this in XRPL Insights, including the full story of the two pizzas.