A History of XRP and Ripple, 2011–2013

The account most often cited for this period is a 2018 retrospective, A History of XRP & Ripple: Part 1. It traces the idea back to Ryan Fugger, whose Ripplepay was conceived in 2004 as a way for people to extend credit lines to friends and family — a network of personal trust rather than a ledger of balances. That site is still online, and its founding essay survives in archive, describing the idea in Fugger’s own words. The site itself does not: the 2018 retrospective noted it was “still up and running”, but classic.ripplepay.com today serves only a domain-parking page, so the essay is readable now only because someone archived it.

Arthur Britto, Jed McCaleb and David Schwartz began work on the XRP Ledger in the spring of 2011, building toward consensus instead of mining. Chris Larsen joined in August 2012. Shortly after, McCaleb and Larsen approached Fugger about merging the digital asset with his credit network, he agreed, and OpenCoin was founded. The early operation was funded conventionally — this predates the ICO — and the retrospective puts the total at around $9 million, which sustained the company for roughly three years.

That $9 million figure can be broken out. Three rounds closed in 2013, and their named investors are a matter of public record:

The three rounds sum to exactly $9.0 million, which is the figure the retrospective gives without itemising it. Two sources that do not depend on each other land on the same number, which is about as much corroboration as an off-chain claim in this article gets. It is also worth sitting with the scale: the company that held 80 billion XRP raised nine million dollars, and the first round closed in April 2013 — three months after the ledger snapshot, and two months after the giveaway began.

Those three are the complete set for 2013; we checked for others and found none. The next raise did not come until May 2015— a $28 million Series A — so the nine million really did have to cover the intervening two years and one month, which is what “sustained the company for three years” amounts to in practice. One naming note: FF Angel LLC appears in other coverage as FF Angel IV, the Founders Fund vehicle, so it is one investor under two names rather than two.

Round details are from Ripple Labs. None of this paragraph is verifiable from the ledger. It is reported here as a secondary account, with its sources linked, and should be read that way.

One claim in that history does touch the chain, and it is the one most often repeated. The initial distribution is given as a four-way split: 80 billion to the company, 9 billion to Jed McCaleb, 7 billion to Chris Larsen and 4 billion to other founders.

Ledger 32,570 is the earliest complete state that survives, and it holds all 100 billion XRP across 136 accounts. So the claim can be tested directly:

The straightforward reading is that 80/9/7/4 describes an intended allocation, or a later arrangement, rather than the ledger on 1 January 2013. That is not a contradiction — an allocation can be agreed long before it is moved into separate accounts, and the 79-billion dispersal out of the company account did not happen until 26 January, twenty-five days after the snapshot. But it does mean the three founder figures should not be quoted as on-chain facts. Only the 80 billion is one.

For where the money went after that date, see Where the First 100 Billion XRP Went; for why the earlier ledgers are missing, see The Lost Ledgers.

Rows marked on-chain can be checked against surviving ledger state. The rest are reported from secondary sources.

The company had 80 billion XRP and very little cash, so it spent the asset it had. On 20 February 2013 OpenCoin opened a forum giveaway: 1,000 XRP to any member registered before the 19th. It ran for months and the claim list reached hundreds of pages.

The timing is worth noticing. That promotion began twenty-five days after the company account moved 79 billion XRP out to nine addresses, and three days before the public discussion in which those same addresses were enumerated and identified as OpenCoin’s treasury. And it began at a point when XRP had no price at all: the earliest surviving quotes start on 28 February 2013, eight days later, at 65,000 XRP to the bitcoin.

Later that year the company renamed itself from OpenCoin to Ripple Labs, announced around the Money2020 expo, and in late November launched a second promotion with Georgia Tech’s Computing for Good, paying XRP to people who donated CPU time to the World Community Grid. Neither event is visible in ledger data in any way we can isolate, and both are reported here on the secondary source’s authority.

In 2018 Ripple published its own telling of the same period. It is a company retrospective rather than a document, so it carries the same caveat as everything else in this article that is not on the chain — but it is the founders describing their own start, which is worth hearing directly.

Everything marked on-chain above was read from ledger 32,570 and later, via ledger_data and account_tx against s1.ripple.com. The snapshot contains 136 AccountRoot objects summing to exactly 100,000,000,000 XRP, which is what makes the 80/20 test decisive rather than approximate: there is nowhere else for the money to be.

Everything else — Fugger and Ripplepay, the founding of OpenCoin, the funding rounds and their $9 million total, the ownership percentages, the rename, the World Community Grid partnership — is off-chain and is reported on the authority of the sources below. We have not independently verified any of it, and a reader who wants certainty on those points should go to the primary sources rather than to us.

One further caution about the founder split. Our identification of the 8.189 billion account as Chris Larsen’s is an address-cluster inference from our own accounts records, not a statement by anyone involved. What the ledger proves without any attribution at all is narrower and stronger: at ledger 32,570, no account held 9 billion XRP, and only one held between 6.5 and 9.5 billion.