What is the history of XRP?

The full answer

XRPL.org’s History page credits Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto and David Schwartz with building the XRP Ledger and says the code was complete by June 2012.[1][2] XRPL.org says the ledger first launched that June.[2] At creation there were 100 billion XRP.[1] The SEC’s 2020 complaint gives a different month: it says the ledger was completed in December 2012, when the 100 billion XRP were created.[3] The public sources do not settle which month is right. This page lists the dated events in order, each tied to a public source.

Who received the 100 billion XRP at the start?

In September 2012, McCaleb and Britto, with Chris Larsen, formed the company, then called OpenCoin Inc., and gave it 80 billion XRP in exchange for developing on the ledger.[1] The SEC’s 2020 complaint says the other 20 billion went to the founders themselves: 9 billion each to McCaleb and Larsen, and 2 billion to a third co-founder the complaint calls “Ripple Agent-1”.[3]

How did the company go from OpenCoin to Ripple Labs to Ripple?

XRPL.org says the group started the company as NewCoin in September 2012. It was quickly renamed OpenCoin, then rebranded Ripple Labs, under a heading XRPL.org dates to 2013, and that name has since been shortened to Ripple.[2] None of the public sources checked give the year of the last change.

Why did Jed McCaleb leave, and how did that lead to Stellar?

Stellar’s launch post said McCaleb was “resuming development of the open-source technology he created at Ripple”, working with Stanford professor David Mazières.[4] CoinDesk reported that Stellar launched in July 2014.[5]

McCaleb’s XRP then became a point of dispute. CoinDesk reported that Ripple and McCaleb struck an agreement in August 2014.[6] A federal court order in California, dated January 14, 2016, set out the Stellar Development Foundation’s allegations in a later dispute. In that summary, the agreement came out of negotiations over Ripple’s “concerns” about his XRP sales, set monthly limits on what he could sell, and covered about 7.5 billion XRP.[7] These are allegations the court recorded, not findings.

What happened between 2013 and 2020?

On May 5, 2015, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) fined Ripple Labs $700,000. FinCEN said the company sold XRP without registering as a money services business and did not keep an adequate anti-money-laundering program.[8]

In December 2017, Ripple locked 55 billion XRP in a series of escrows on the ledger. They release up to 1 billion XRP a month, and whatever Ripple does not use goes into a new escrow at the back of the queue.[9] An independent tracker cited by crypto.news put the amount still in escrow at about 31.28 billion XRP after the September 2026 release.[10] A later xrp-insights supply report, with figures as of September 26, 2026, put Ripple’s on-ledger escrow at 31.98B XRP, summed from live Escrow objects on the XRP Ledger. The mechanics, and why the balance falls more slowly than 1 billion a month, are on how XRP escrow works.

What was the SEC case, and how did it end?

On December 22, 2020, the SEC sued Ripple, Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse. The SEC alleged that they “raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering.”[11]

On July 13, 2023, Judge Analisa Torres ruled that XRP as a token is not by itself an investment contract. She found that Ripple’s direct sales to institutions, about $728.9 million by the SEC’s count, were unregistered sales of investment contracts. Ripple’s sales on exchanges and its other distributions were not.[12] The district court’s final judgment imposed a $125,035,150 civil penalty on Ripple and an injunction against violating the securities registration rules, according to the SEC.[14] The court’s remedies ruling of August 7, 2024 also denied the SEC’s request for disgorgement, according to the copy on Justia; that copy could not be fetched for a word-for-word check.[13]

Both sides appealed. On August 7, 2025, the SEC filed a joint stipulation with Ripple, Larsen and Garlinghouse dismissing both appeals, which ended the case with the district court’s judgment in place.[14] The claims and rulings, and what the judgment still requires, are laid out in the SEC v. Ripple case explained.

What came after the case ended?

Nasdaq listed the Canary XRP ETF (XRPC) effective November 13, 2025.[15] Ripple’s insights page says REX-Osprey’s XRPR, which it describes as offering the earliest spot exposure, had already been live since September 18, 2025. Crypto News Daily reported that three Canadian spot XRP ETFs from Purpose Investments, Evolve Funds and 3iQ launched on the Toronto Stock Exchange on June 18, 2025. How these funds hold XRP is covered in what an XRP ETF is. Ripple’s insights page says most issuers had been working through the 240-day review window and were on course to reach approval in November or December regardless of the SEC’s new generic listing standards, which it says provided clarity and, for some issuers, a degree of acceleration.

An SEC interpretive release that took effect on March 23, 2026 names XRP among its examples of digital commodities. It says digital commodities “are not themselves securities”, and also that a non-security crypto asset “can be offered and sold subject to an investment contract, which is a security”.[16]

This page does not track price. The price and market value across these periods are on XRP’s price and market cap history.

What do critics point to in this history?

Three parts of this record carry most of the criticism. First, according to the SEC’s complaint, the founders transferred all 100 billion XRP after founding Ripple in September 2012: 80 billion to the company and the remaining 20 billion to themselves.[3] Second, a US regulator fined Ripple in 2015 for selling XRP without registering.[8] Third, a federal court found in 2023 that Ripple’s direct sales to institutions, about $728.9 million by the SEC’s count, broke the securities registration rules.[12]

The same records hold the other side. The court found that XRP itself is not an investment contract and that Ripple’s exchange sales were not securities sales.[12] According to the Justia copy of its remedies ruling, it denied disgorgement.[13] The SEC’s 2026 release names XRP as a digital commodity.[16] Each strand of the critique, with the evidence for and against it, is on why many crypto people dislike XRP.