But why?

You may ask what is the point of all this: "just trusting friends with money? Isn't that trivial? Couldn't we have done that already? And if we didn't doesn't that mean it is a bad idea? What innovation is Cassis bringing up to the table?"

It is true that the basic idea behind Cassis was already developed by Ryan Fugger in 2005 and that his service, ripplepay.com, operated in a similar way to what a Cassis server is doing now.