CTO Ripple, David Schwartz shared on Twitter an idea he conceived in 2011. “I was going through some old files and found this provisional patent application that I filed in 2011. I never got further. ‘Social Networking Front End for Cloud Storage,'” he said.
I was going through old files and found this provisional patent application that I had filed in 2011. I never went any further. “Social Network Front End for Cloud Storage” pic.twitter.com/DZCnL3al7v
—David “JoelKatz” Schwartz (@JoelKatz) January 24, 2023
According to the screenshot shared by the Ripple CTO, the invention was both a cloud storage solution and a social networking application.
The idea behind the invention was to improve ease of use in saving and sharing user information by presenting a cloud storage system in a familiar form.
“Tasks that would be complex and technical are done by presenting the user with the familiar interface of social networking games. This also allows a cloud storage system to take advantage of the same business model as social networking games” , indicates the document.
The social media platform Twitter was created in March 2006 and launched in July, while Facebook (now Meta) was launched earlier, in February 2004. So Schwartz’s idea may have been to add a touch of difference to an existing innovation.
Why Schwartz dropped the idea
Asked by a user why he forgot about this beautiful idea, which would have caused waves around the world, Schwartz replied: “I don’t remember. In fact, when I came across the files today today I had to read them carefully to remember what the idea was.”
Years after David Schwartz forgot his idea, decentralized cloud storage solutions like Storj, Filecoin, Siacoin, and Arweave came onto the scene.
The year 2011 was significant in the history of XRPL as Arthur Britto, David Schwartz and Jed McCaleb started working on XRP Ledger. Schwartz made his first engagement in November 2011.
Thus, the Ripple CTO might have abandoned his idea to focus on XRPL, which gave birth to XRP, the sixth largest cryptocurrency in the world.
As reported by U.Today, David Schwartz says he could have been part of “Satoshi” – a small group of people who created Bitcoin – but unfortunately he didn’t discover the world’s first cryptocurrency until in 2011.