Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz recounts a fun fact from XRP's history that reveals early interest in the cryptocurrency and its technology. In a tweet, Schwartz recalled the first email anyone had ever sent him that had the word "XRP" in it. The email was from Vinnie Falco asking for some XRP back in February 2013.
"Fun fact: The first email anyone ever sent me that had the word 'XRP' in it was from Vinnie Falco asking for some back in February of 2013," Schwartz said, sharing a screenshot of the said email.
Fun fact: The first email anyone ever sent me that had the word "XRP" in it was from @FalcoVinnie asking for some back in February of 2013. pic.twitter.com/XZqGnsqLHp
— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) March 18, 2026
The email had the subject "XRP please" and further reads: "Joel, Hey Buddy, this is Vinnie from the Bitcoin Talk forum. Ive decided to make a Ripple account so i can fully investigate the potential of the technology. Can you please float me some XRPs?"
This fun fact shared drew the attention of the XRP community. The subject of the email caught the attention of Vet, an XRP Ledger validator, describing it as "Best email subject.XRP Please."
Vinnie Falco had been a participant in the Bitcoin Talk forum as well as being Ripple CTO Emeritus.
A community member had asked the Ripple CTO Emeritus if he had sent him some. Schwartz responded that the inventor of Google autocomplete, Alex Kravets, sent him XRP instead.
The discovery of the potential of the XRP Ledger technology led Vinnie Falcon to join Ripple. Falco was part of the team that developed and published Beast, the HTTP and WebSocket library written in C++ and used in Ripple.
In early 2011, three developers, David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto were fascinated with Bitcoin but observed the waste inherent in mining. Then they set out to create a better version that improved upon its limitations with the goal of creating a digital asset that was more sustainable and built specifically for payments.
The trio of developers continued the work to build a distributed ledger that improved upon these fundamental limitations of Bitcoin, originally naming the code Ripple, with XRP Ledger later launching in June 2012.