[1] In 2011, engineers David Schwartz and Jed McCaleb began a financial infrastructure similar to bitcoin that would use substantially less energy and drastically reduce transaction time.

[12][13] In June 2023, Ripple received approval for a license from the central bank of Singapore to offer regulated digital payment token products and services.

The firm funds accepted startups with up to US$50,000 (equivalent to $66,411 in 2024) in XRP, Ripple's native currency, in exchange for a 3% to 6% stake in diluted common stock.

DATA provides best practices and technical standards, including anti-money laundering compliance guidance for companies that work with digital currency and other alternative payments systems.

[25] On June 13, 2016, Ripple obtained a virtual currency license from the New York State Department of Financial Services, making it the fourth company with a BitLicense.

Ripple countersued, claiming that R3 reneged on a number of contractual promises, and was simply acting in a spirit of opportunism, after the cryptocurrency increased in value more than 30 times.

[28] In February 2020 an article in Financial Times Alphaville revealed that MoneyGram, the largest public user of Ripple's XRP based liquidity tools, had received a $50m investment prior to adopting the tools and also that the software was provided free of charge by Ripple and that MoneyGram was receiving an on-going subsidy for using XRP, amounting to $8.9m in Q4 2019.

[30] The SEC alleged that Ripple, co-founder Christian Larsen and CEO Bradley Garlinghouse, raised more than $1.3 billion through an unregistered securities offering.

[32] In April 2021, Judge Sarah Netburn granted a motion from Garlinghouse and Larsen to dismiss the SEC's subpoenas for access to eight years' of banking records, referring to the request as a "wholly inappropriate overreach."

[33] In July 2023, the district court ruled on the SEC lawsuit, finding that the XRP token sold by Ripple Labs was not a security.

[44] In October 2020, Ripple board member Ken Kurson[45] resigned from the company when he was charged with committing a range of cyber-crimes by the United States Attorney for the southern district of New York.