David Schwartz (데이비드 슈워츠), former chief technology officer of Ripple, directly addressed a long-running dispute over the origins of XRP. He rejected as untrue claims raised in some communities that XRP was created before bitcoin or that Ryan Fugger was the founder of XRP. Schwartz stressed that XRP’s real history began in 2012.

On June 26, blockchain media outlets U.Today and Decrypt reported that Schwartz recently explained XRP’s technical origins and development process through social media.

At the centre of the dispute was “RipplePay,” developed in 2004 by Canadian programmer Ryan Fugger (라이언 푸거). Some users had regarded Fugger as XRP’s founder because of the similar name, but Schwartz said RipplePay and today’s XRP are technically completely different systems.

He said RipplePay was a trust-based payment network with neither a blockchain nor a digital asset. He acknowledged that Fugger presented the concept of a decentralised payment network well before bitcoin, but drew a line at viewing it as a direct precursor of the XRP token or the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

The real turning point came in 2012. After Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb acquired RipplePay from Fugger, the OpenCoin team completely replaced the technology base. Schwartz said the purpose of the acquisition was “an easy-to-remember name and brand,” and that the technology was developed again from scratch.

McCaleb, Arthur Britto and Schwartz then wrote new code to create the XRP Ledger and the XRP token, he said, adding that essentially only the name remained from the previous system. Schwartz said, “The real history of XRP begins in 2012,” and stressed that interpreting today’s XRP as directly connected to RipplePay is not technically correct.

The remarks also rebut another claim that has recently resurfaced. Some XRP supporters have cited a U.S. patent filed by Schwartz in 1988 to argue that XRP was developed before bitcoin, and have even claimed it was a project secretly developed by the U.S. government.

The dispute grew after an X user known as “Crypto Dail News” shared an image of Schwartz’s U.S. patent number 5,025,369. The patent relates to technology for distributed computer systems, but some communities interpreted it as linked to XRP’s origins.

Matt Hamilton (맷 해밀턴), a former Ripple developer and former Ripple director, dismissed the claim, saying, “This patent has nothing to do with XRP.” He said bitcoin appeared before XRP, and that the patent is not material showing the starting point of the XRP Ledger or the XRP cryptocurrency.

An XRPL validator known as “Vet” (벳) also took the same position. He said the patent is not about distributed ledger technology but about distributed computing that divides processing tasks across multiple computers, and that it is a completely different concept from blockchain’s core consensus algorithms or shared-ledger structures.

Other community developers expressed similar views. Jaime Williamson (제이미 윌리엄슨) said the patent is material showing Schwartz’s early research on distributed computing, but cannot be directly linked to XRP. Jeremy Bouchard (제러미 부샤드) also said the patent does not include key elements of modern distributed ledgers such as cryptographic consensus structures, append-only ledgers, or synchronisation among network participants.

The core of the dispute, meanwhile, is the need to distinguish continuity in naming from continuity in technology. RipplePay may be the branding starting point of today’s XRP, but it is not its technical precursor, and the XRP Ledger and XRP token began with new code written in 2012, according to a shared explanation from Schwartz and Ripple developers. As a result, the view is gaining weight that claims treating Fugger as XRP’s founder or linking the 1988 patent to XRP’s birth lack technical basis.