Controversial cryptocurrency remains a household name after surviving turbulent decade
The Ripple-affiliated cryptocurrency called XRP has just turned 10 years old.
Apart from Bitcoin and Dogecoin, it is the only OG cryptocurrency to remain one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap.
Ripple Labs co-founders Arthur Brito, David Schwartz and Jed McCaleb began working on the XRP Ledger in 2011. Schwartz’s first commitment dates back to November 2011.
On 2 June 2012, Brito introduced the lines of code that created 100 billion tokens, then known as “XNS”.
However, the earliest transaction history of the controversy-ridden cryptocurrency has been erased as the ledger was reset multiple times due to a bug.
The current version of the XRP Ledger was launched in December 2012.
To date, over 72 million ledgers have been confirmed on the XRP Ledger, taking the total number of transactions to over 807,000.
A substantial portion of the 100 billion tokens (20%) were gifted to Brito, McCaleb and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen. The latter joined engineers after starting a new company called NewCoin (which was rebranded OpenCoin shortly after its launch). OpenCoin was rebranded to Ripple in 2013. The company received the vast majority of pre-mined tokens (80%).Despite attracting accusations of centralization, XRP experienced a major rally in 2017, rising by over 32,000% and briefly becoming the second cryptocurrency.
At the end of 2017, Ripple held 55% of the total supply. Subsequently, it announced that it would hold the token in escrow for 55 months to control selling pressure.
In late 2020, Ripple was sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly illegally selling XRP. The regulator alleges that the token is an unregistered security.
The matter, which is expected to have a major impact on the entire industry, is yet to be resolved.
