What does "XRP" stand for?

The full answer

Where did the name XRP come from?

XRPL.org’s history page says the ledger’s builders worked on the project “originally naming the code Ripple”. The ledger “included a digital asset that would originally be called ‘ripples’ (XRP as the currency code)” [1]. So XRP was there from 2012, as the code for an asset whose everyday name was ripples.

The passages quoted from XRPL.org’s history page and its currency documentation, both checked on September 29, 2026, treat XRP as a currency code and do not expand the letters [1][3].

When and why did the asset’s name change from ripples to XRP?

XRPL.org places the change in its 2013 section. “With the community starting to refer to the digital asset as XRP, company leaders decided to rebrand the company to Ripple Labs, which has been shortened over time to ‘Ripple’” [1]. The company had started in September 2012 as NewCoin, was “quickly renamed OpenCoin” [1], and was called OpenCoin Inc. when it received 80 billion XRP from the founders [5].

The order matters. Users adopted the code XRP as the asset’s name, and the company then took the name Ripple [1]. For a time the code, the asset and the company all carried some form of “Ripple”. In our reading, that shared history is a likely reason many people still call XRP “Ripple”. The difference between the three today is set out in Ripple, XRP and the XRP Ledger.

Does the X follow the ISO 4217 convention for non-national currency codes?

ISO 4217 is the international standard for three-letter currency codes, and Wikipedia’s article on it quotes ISO’s rule: “The first two letters of the ISO 4217 three-letter code are the same as the code for the country name, and, where possible, the third letter corresponds to the first letter of the currency name” [2]. The article’s own example is JPY, “JP” for Japan and “Y” for yen [2].

Codes beginning with X are used for things no country issues. Wikipedia’s summary of the standard lists gold (XAU), silver (XAG) and the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing right (XDR), and notes that no country code beginning with X will ever be assigned [2]. XRP fits that pattern: an X for an asset tied to no country, plus two letters for its name.

The same summary says “cryptocurrencies have not been assigned an ISO 4217 code” [2]. XRP therefore follows the standard’s style without being on its official list. On the XRP Ledger itself, the code is reserved: the standard format for token currency codes is “a three-character string such as USD”, but “the currency code XRP (all-uppercase) is disallowed” [3].

What have the creators said about the name?

On February 23, 2024, ForkLog reported that Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, had “shared the story behind the naming” of XRP [4]. ForkLog relayed it through a post on X by a third party, which read “X: Not issued by any country RP: ‘Ripples’ = $XRP”, and through its own paraphrase: for assets belonging to no country the code starts with X, as with gold’s XAU, and the token was called “ripples” from early development [4]. ForkLog marks the article as AI-translated. Schwartz’s original statement has not been found, so this explanation is unverified. It is consistent with XRPL.org’s account that ripples was the asset’s first name [1].

Does the name say anything about ISO 20022?

None of the sources cited here connects the name to ISO 20022; they tie it only to currency-code style under ISO 4217. Claims that XRP is “ISO 20022 compliant” are examined in XRP and ISO 20022 claims. The wider case made against XRP by its critics is collected in why crypto critics dislike XRP.