A short history

In early 2011 three engineers started work on a new ledger: David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto. They wanted a way to send value without Bitcoin-style mining. A May 2011 forum post on the idea is titled "Bitcoin without mining."

The ledger launched in June 2012. Chris Larsen joined soon after.

In September 2012 the group started a company. It was called NewCoin, then quickly renamed OpenCoin. In 2013 it became Ripple Labs, later shortened to Ripple. The founders gave the company 80 billion XRP. Ripple later placed most of it in escrow.

Names caused confusion for years. The whole project was first called Ripple. The asset was called "ripples," with the currency code XRP. Over time the community settled on "XRP" for the asset and "XRP Ledger" for the network. Ripple is a company that uses and contributes to the ledger. It is not the ledger.

On 2020-09-24 the XRPL Foundation was founded as an independent nonprofit.

The ledger has kept running since 2012. One gap remains. The first two weeks or so of history were lost to a server bug at the time. The earliest ledger anyone has is number 32570.

Each closed ledger version has a ledger index that sets its order. Each version also holds a state tree: all the data in the ledger, including balances and settings. So current balances do not depend on the missing early ledgers.

A server reports the ledgers it holds in complete_ledgers. On 2026-11-10 the public mainnet server s2.ripple.com returned:

"complete_ledgers": "32570-108248978"

xrpl.org states that ledger index 32570 is the earliest available ledger version in the production XRP Ledger's history. A full-history server cannot fetch anything older, because no one has it.

Dated events from xrpl.org's History and "What is XRP?" pages:

Ripple publishes how much XRP it holds and how much is in escrow on its own reporting site.

How the ledger changes today is covered in How amendments happen. How validators agree is covered in Consensus, validators and the UNL.