Ripple CTO Breaks Silence on Choice of Ripple Naming

Ripple CTO David Schwartz has broken his silence on a long-standing question in the cryptocurrency community: Was Ripple named after the Grateful Dead’s iconic song?

In a recent X conversation, a user asked the Ripple CTO if the name “Ripple” was inspired by the Grateful Dead’s 1970 hit song “Ripple.”

Schwartz responded, saying, “Somewhat. I think if we weren’t able to get the domain ripple.com, we likely wouldn’t have chosen the name ripple. We got the domain because a great guy who was a Dead fan registered it because of the song and he liked the company.”

Somewhat. I think if we weren’t able to get the domain https://t.co/TrIRwHx1ub, we likely wouldn’t have chosen the name @ripple. We got the domain because a great guy who was a Dead fan registered it because of the song and he liked the company.

— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) July 3, 2025

The Ripple CTO’s response suggests that, while the name “Ripple” was not directly inspired by the song, the availability of the ripple.com domain — owned by a Grateful Dead fan who loved the company — played a key role in the naming decision.

Historical flashback

In 2011, David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto started building the XRP Ledger (XRPL). The three developers continued their efforts to create a distributed ledger that addressed Bitcoin’s core shortcomings, originally naming the code “Ripple.”

The XRP Ledger was then launched in June 2012. The trio was soon joined by Chris Larsen, and in September 2012, they founded NewCoin, which was later renamed OpenCoin.

In 2013, Opencoin was relaunched as Ripple Labs. During the first talks with potential customers, the team was asked about the distinctions between the Ripple project and the OpenCoin company. With the community referring to the digital asset as XRP, company officials chose to rebrand the company as Ripple Labs, which has since been shortened to “Ripple.”

Ripple is applying for a national bank charter in the United States, in a recent major milestone, following a similar move by stablecoin giant Circle.

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