Ryan Fugger

In the beginning, Ripple was very far from all crypto technologies. Its original brand name was Ripplepay. In 2004 in Vancouver, Canada, Ryan Fugger, a software developer, founded Ripple long before Satoshi Nakamoto launched his first version of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Ripplepay had the same perspective – providing its users with tools to securely transfer money globally, but didn’t use any blockchain technologies. Satoshi Nakamoto knew about this payment system and commented that Ripple is interesting because it’s the only other system that makes something with trust besides focusing on a central server. It worked for many years until Fugger sold it to Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, and David Schwartz, who wanted to modify it for their future digital currency network. The new venture was called OpenCoin.

OpenCoin developed its new technology using Ripplepay’s source code, set up a register-based payment network for financial institutions, and closed two angel funding rounds in 2013. That same year, McCalebb, the former founder of Mt. Gox, left the company to create Stellar and forking Ripple into a new Stellar Lumens network. As a co-founder of Ripple, he had a large amount of XRP, the network’s local coin. McCalebb has already sold 1 billion XRP and still has more than 8 billion.

Fugger’s now serving as an Advisor to a firm called Clout. Clout is a blockchain media platform focused similar to a social media sharing platform like Reddit.

Users create and submit content consumed and assessed by other users. Because they evaluate the content being shared or raised, the consuming users can reward the content (and the users who made or shared it) with a token called CLC. CLC is issued on a one-for-one basis with another token called CLOUT, the company’s ICO token, and will also be tradable (post-ICO) over the various cryptocurrency traders that exist in the market today.

Clout differentiates itself from Reddit by using its CLC tokens as a voting tool, whereas Reddit uses the standard upvote system. It translates to direct monetary gain for content creators, incentivizing quality content production and sharing.

Further, Clout is crypto-focused. So that’s what Fugger is working on now? Suppose he can get anywhere close to replicating the success he achieved at Ripple with Clout. In that case, the Fugger could be a real winner and one of the top ICOs to watch right now.