XRP

David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto began work in 2011 on a ledger that could settle value without proof-of-work mining. By June 2012 the XRP Ledger was live. Its servers did not race for a block reward; each listened to validators on a chosen Unique Node List and compared proposals until a supermajority agreed on the next state.

That design moved power away from miners without making trust disappear. A server operator chooses its list, but safety depends on strong overlap with the lists other operators use. Ripple and the XRP Ledger Foundation publish the two recommended lists used by default configurations, so publishers influence which independent validators receive broad trust even though they do not approve transactions themselves.

Chris Larsen joined after the ledger launched. In September 2012, Larsen, McCaleb and Britto formed NewCoin, quickly renamed OpenCoin; Schwartz served as chief cryptographer and Britto as an adviser. The company later became Ripple Labs and then Ripple. Calling all of this “Ripple” hid an important sequence: the code and currency existed before the corporation took shape.

The ledger began with 100 billion XRP. The founders gave 80 billion to the company so it could build uses around the network, leaving 20 billion with the founders. The grant gave Ripple a way to fund staff, market liquidity and partnerships, while also making the private company’s sales policy economically important to a public ledger it did not exclusively operate.

By 2017 Ripple still held enough XRP for an abrupt sale to worry markets. It placed 55 billion into 55 on-ledger escrows, initially making one billion available on the first day of each month. Ledger rules enforce the release date; they do not decide whether Ripple sells, distributes or re-locks the amount after release. Unused XRP was placed into new escrows at the end of the queue.

The mechanism created a visible ceiling rather than a fixed circulation schedule. On 30 June 2026 Ripple reported 37,656,053,914 XRP held in total, including 32.6 billion in escrow, and 62,329,587,596 distributed. Meanwhile every transaction destroyed a small fee. Ledger 106,765,783 therefore showed 99,985,620,168.198087 XRP—below the original 100 billion, with no mining process able to restore the difference.

On 22 December 2020 the SEC sued Ripple, Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse, alleging more than $1.3 billion in unregistered offers and sales. The complaint was an allegation, not the result. On 13 July 2023 Judge Analisa Torres separated the record: Ripple’s contractual institutional sales satisfied Howey, while blind programmatic exchange sales did not because buyers could not know their money went to Ripple. Other distributions and the executives’ sales also produced different results.

The distinction matters because the court did not treat XRP itself as an investment contract in every setting. Nor did it bless every sale. It found Ripple liable for institutional transactions and rejected its fair-notice defense for those sales; the SEC later dismissed its aiding-and-abetting claims against Larsen and Garlinghouse before trial.

On 7 August 2024 the district court ordered Ripple to pay $125,035,150 and enjoined future violations of Securities Act registration rules. Both sides appealed. In 2025 they proposed reducing the payment to $50 million and dissolving the injunction, but the district court declined the requested relief. That proposed compromise never became the operative judgment.

The parties instead dismissed the SEC appeal and Ripple cross-appeal on 7 August 2025. The litigation ended with the 2023 transaction-specific rulings and the 2024 penalty and injunction still in place. XRP continued to settle on a ledger governed by validator trust and amendments, while Ripple remained a major holder constrained in how it could conduct future institutional sales.