XRP, the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is marking 11 solid years of its existence. The XRP Ledger first launched in June 2012, although development began in 2011.
In 2011, three engineers — David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto — began developing XRP Ledger (XRPL). Fascinated by Bitcoin, they set out to develop a better version that addressed its shortcomings and created a digital asset that was more sustainable and built specifically for payments.
Happy Birthday $XRP 🎂 pic.twitter.com/ktY0r8ubKU
— XRP_Cro 🛸 (@stedas) June 2, 2023
On June 2, 2012, Arthur Britto submitted lines of code that produced 100 billion XRP tokens (then called “XNS”). According to Ripple CTO David Schwartz, that day is regarded as the cryptocurrency’s official birthday. The XRPL founders gifted 80 billion XRP to the company. Ripple has since placed the bulk in escrow.
However, the earliest history of XRP Ledger can only be located as far back as December 2012.
At present, more than 80 million ledgers have been generated on XRP Ledger, with an index of 80,190,143.
Here’s how price reacted
The price of XRP has had ups and downs during its 11-year existence. It soared approximately 32,000% during the 2017 bull market, reaching a record high of $3.84 on Jan. 4, 2018.
The Ripple-SEC lawsuit was filed in December 2020, shortly after which the price of XRP fell sharply to lows of $0.16.
Currently, the XRP price remains in the green as optimism builds around the resolution of the Ripple-SEC lawsuit. From May 24 to now, XRP has marked seven out of nine days in the green.
At the time of writing, the price of XRP was $0.515, up 11% over the previous week and 1.72% over the previous 24 hours.