What is XRP

The Company That Built a Currency Part 1 of 5: How Ripple and XRP actually began — and where they stand today Reading time: ~10 minutes There's a strange thing happening with XRP right now, and it's the reason this series exists. In August 2026, Ripple — the company — is having the best year of its life. It raised half a billion dollars at a $40 billion valuation. It has spent roughly $3 billion buying its way into the plumbing of regulated finance. Deutsche Bank moves money on its rails. BNY Mellon holds its stablecoin reserves. Mastercard settles credit card transactions through its ledger. The lawsuit that nearly killed it is dead and buried. And XRP — the token — trades at $1.08. That's about 72% below its all-time high. It has fallen for six straight months, the longest losing streak since 2014. It's slipped to roughly sixth place by market value, behind coins that didn't exist when Ripple was founded. One of those things is supposed to drive the other. That's the whole premise. So what happened? Answering that takes five parts, and this is the first one. Before we get to escrow schedules, court rulings, or whether XRP can overtake Ethereum, it helps to understand where this thing came from — because almost every argument people have about XRP today traces back to decisions made before 2013. It started as a favor between friends The oldest ancestor of XRP has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Around 2004, a Vancouver web developer named Ryan Fugger built something called RipplePay. The idea was disarmingly simple: money is mostly just trust. If you owe me twenty dollars and I owe someone else twenty dollars, and that person happens to know you, the debt can be settled by rearranging who owes whom — no cash ever has to move. Fugger wanted to build a network where people could extend credit to friends, and payments would route through chains of trust like water finding a path downhill. It was clever. It also never got big. Trust doesn't scale well between…