Although, Ethereum's "genesis block" was mined using PoW. Miners and node operators had to generate the data for the Genesis Block by themselves by scraping th

Although, Ethereum's "genesis block" was mined using PoW. Miners and node operators had to generate the data for the Genesis Block by themselves by scraping the Bitcoin chain which contained the crowdsale transaction data. The Ethereum Foundation only provided a script for scraping the Bitcoin chain. See here: https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/07/27/final-steps/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/07/27/final-steps/ (The genesis block contains all the ETH token allocations for each crowdsale account) Another technicality is that Ether was sold as a commodity, for the purpose of using it for "gas" to use for computational resources. Ripple on the other hand is not used for gas, you don't pay for computing resources. You only pay a tiny fee in XRP per transaction.