I'm not sure what it has to do with anything, but that's not my recollection. I visited Ripple's site before Bitcoin became big, I'm pretty sure it was before I heard of Bitcoin and I've been around since very early. At that time "ripple" was about connections between people - friends and friends of friends - using those relationships to be able to transact value in the form of IOUs, for anything, like dollars. I thought that was a very cool model, but there was no "XRP" or mention of cryptocurrency in existence at that time. There didn't need to be, because it was all about social network relationships.