Ripple CTO Recalls Earliest Moment of Internet: Details

Ripple CTO David Schwartz recently participated in an X discussion, which wasn’t based on cryptocurrencies per se, but a topic with a likely inclination: the internet.

Schools of thought refer to Web3 as the next iteration of the internet, albeit decentralized, with blockchain being the key technology behind it.

The discussion began when Nikita Bier, the head of product at X and advisor at Solana, threw a question at his 616,600 X followers, asking them what their earliest memory of the internet was.

The tweet caught the attention of the Ripple CTO, who shared his earliest memory of the internet to be “editing DOS startup files to load a packet driver, configuring SLIP on SLS Linux (on 14 floppy disks), and memorizing bang paths.”

This knowledge of the internet was what the Ripple CTO built on, going on to create XRP in 2012, although work on XRP Ledger began in 2011.

In June 2012, David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto launched a distributed ledger that improved upon these fundamental limitations of Bitcoin, XRP Ledger, with its native cryptocurrency XRP.

Internet of value

Cryptocurrency and blockchain are transforming the exchange of value, much as the internet did for the exchange of information, and the journey is expected to be very much the same. The cryptocurrency movement emerged from the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis with the belief that the financial system could be improved to benefit everyone.

Cryptocurrency’s use cases vary worldwide, with more use cases possible with emerging Web3 technologies.

In this light, XRP Ledger’s updated institutional DeFi road map prepares for what lies ahead in the next months. This focuses on two themes shaping the next stage of XRPL’s institutional DeFi evolution: the launch of a native lending protocol and the integration of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for privacy with accountability.