Who Created Ripple (XRP) Cryptocurrency?

By Kapil Gauhar

The origin of Ripple has always been unclear, since the facts available say one thing, and the company officials say another.

Though the CEO of Ripple, Chris Larsen, and the chief market strategist, Cory Johnson, have made it sufficiently clear by their media tours that Ripple is, in fact, not issued and created by the company.

They still have a lot of explaining to do with respect to the skeletons of the past which are crawling out of the closet.

In order to avoid further confusion in the community, Jed McCaleb and Cory Johnson went on a media tour to clarify that Ripple is not a security and that it’s not created by the company itself.

One such example is the letter written by the Ripple CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, which lists reasons as to why Ripple isn’t a security.

1. “If Ripple, the company, shut down tomorrow, the XRP ledger would continue to operate. It’s open-source, decentralized technology that exists independent of Ripple.”

2. “The people buying XRP, they don’t think they’re buying shares of Ripple. There’s a company called Ripple, we are a private company, we have investors… but buying XRP doesn’t give you ownership of Ripple, it doesn’t give you access to dividends or profits that come from Ripple.”

3. “XRP is solving a problem. There’s no utility in a security.”

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So, Who Created Ripple (XRP)?

The protocol, as a working prototype, was created away back in 2004. But the real history starts from 2013, when Jed McCaleb, the creator of EDonkey network invited a bunch of world rank investors with an aim to invest in Ripple Labs.

Who Are The Founders of Ripple Labs?

Chris Larsen is an angel investor, a privacy activist and business executive who’s considered to be the richest person in cryptocurrency.

He is best known for co-founding various startups in the field of online financial services, starting with an online mortgage lender E-loan back in 1996.

The McCaleb is a famous programmer and as well as entrepreneur, who co-founded several cryptocurrency startups, including Stellar, Ripple, Overnet, eDonkey and a cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox, that at its prime was handling over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions worldwide.

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Who Are Ripple Labs Investors?

Andreessen Horowitz, FF Angel LLC, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Vast Ventures, and Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, invested about $2.5 million in April 2013.

Google Ventures and IDG Capital Partners invested $3 million in May 2013.

Core Innovation Capital, Venture51, Camp One Ventures, and IDG Capital Partners invested $3.5 million in November 2013.

IDG Capital Partners, Seagate Technology, AME Cloud Ventures, ChinaRock Capital Management, China Growth Capital, Wicklow Capital, Bitcoin Opportunity Corp, Core Innovation Capital, Route 66 Ventures, RRE Ventures, Vast Ventures, and Venture 51 invested $28 million in May 2015.

Santander InnoVentures invested $4 million in October 2015.

Standard Chartered, Accenture, SCB Digital Ventures, SBI Holdings, Santander InnoVentures, CME Group, and Seagate Technology invested $55 million in September 2016.

And, Ripple became what it is today.

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Kapil Gauhar

Kapil Gauhar is the founder of Blogger’s Gyan. He is a Passionate Blogger, a Big Thinker and a Creative Writer. His passion for doing friendship with words and letting people know about the wonders of the Digital World is what motivates him to take writing as a career.

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