Many still continue to believe that XRP was created by Ripple, although Ripple executives and XRP Ledger developers have repeatedly denied this fact. In part, this opinion continues to live due to the fact that XRP transactions in the blockchain in the first months of its existence, from July to November 2012 (including during the registration of Ripple), were lost. The earliest history can only be discovered in December 2012.
Ripple CTO David Schwartz once again explained that the registration of Ripple occurred after the launch of the XRP token. Three engineers, David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto, started developing the XRP Ledger in 2011. The engineers decided to improve bitcoin and develop a stable token created specifically for payments. In June 2012, XRP was created, and Ripple (then known as opencoin) was registered in September 2012, three months later.
Schwartz explains why there are no transactions for the first six months of 2012
XRPLedger underwent changes in binary formats in 2012, shortly after registration Ripple Labs. The blockchain developers did not keep a copy of the transaction history from June to November 2012, but instead started over.
Schwartz explains it in his tweet:
Binary formats changed so updated tools couldn’t understand them. We just discarded the old data when we did this. Although copies may have been held by third parties, I don’t know anything.
A Twitter user took an interest and asked if transactions and wallets would still be in XRPL at that time. Schwartz explained that the binary formats had changed and tools updated at the time could not understand them. As a result, the data subsequently became unusable and so the team had to discard it.
Ripple’s CTO responded that he was not sure if anyone was keeping any copies as there was no reason to keep them at the time. This is because it is unlikely that anyone will want them years later. He went on to say that it never occurred to the team to retain data when changing the binary format.