15 Years of XRP Ledger: The History of XRPL

November 11, 2026, marked the 15th anniversary of the beginning of the development of the XRP Ledger (XRPL). According to a post from the official XRP account on the social network X, the first line of code for the future network was written by David Schwartz on November 11, 2011. Together with Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto, he worked on an alternative to Bitcoin focused on facilitating payments and reducing energy consumption. Subsequently, Schwartz held the position of Chief Technology Officer at Ripple and now holds the status of CTO Emeritus.

XRP Ledger was launched in June 2012. In September of the same year, with the participation of Chris Larsen, the company NewCoin was founded, later renamed to OpenCoin, and then to Ripple. The network's creators transferred 80 billion XRP to the company for ecosystem development. In 2017, Ripple initially locked 55 billion XRP through an escrow mechanism, providing for the monthly release of up to 1 billion tokens. According to the company's reports, as of September 30, 2026, 31.7 billion XRP remained in escrow.

Another date coincides with the anniversary of XRPL development: on November 13, 2025, trading began on the American exchange Nasdaq for the Canary XRP ETF under the ticker XRPC. It became the first American exchange-traded fund with spot exposure to XRP, providing investors the opportunity to track the value of the cryptocurrency through an exchange-traded investment product.

The next stage of network development is expected to be the release of XRPL software version 3.5.0, scheduled for December 3, 2026. The update includes technical improvements and bug fixes, including addressing the issue of periodic increases in ledger closing times. The changes aim to resolve identified issues in the network's operation.