Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has pushed back against a resurfaced 2017 post in which he said XRP could not stay “dirt cheap,” rejecting the community’s reading of it as a price guarantee and separately dismissing claims that Ripple holds any hidden mechanism to massively reprice the token.
Summary
- The 2017 post stated XRP could not be dirt cheap if it handled large global transaction volumes, but Schwartz said the comment was about how liquidity needs and transaction value relate.
- Schwartz said he considered deleting the post but decided against it, saying removing it would create more confusion rather than less, and that it continues to be taken out of context years after it was written.
- On May 1, Schwartz separately dismissed the idea that Ripple retains a hidden tool to spike XRP’s value, saying that argument was once barely plausible but is now impossible to sustain given how much time has passed.
David Schwartz addressed the resurging controversy on X after a user accused him of deliberately misleading XRP holders and questioned whether he would delete the 2017 comments. As crypto.news reported, the original post had argued that XRP could not be “dirt cheap” if it were to support large-scale global transactions. Schwartz clarified the post was about market mechanics: if XRP trades at $1, a user needs one million tokens to move $1 million; if XRP trades at $1 million, one token moves the same value. “I think it’s very simple,” Schwartz said. The number of tokens needed changes with price, but the underlying economic logic about transaction capacity does not.
He declined to delete the old post, saying it would remove useful context and add confusion to an already contentious discussion. On the more recent claim that Ripple possesses a hidden lever to drive XRP dramatically higher, Schwartz was direct. “Maybe there was one time when you could semi-plausibly argue that Ripple had some easy way to shoot up the price of XRP massively for good but was just waiting for the right time,” he wrote on X on May 1. “But boy, it’s hard to argue that today.” He posed a blunt market question to the community: “If there were a few very rich, very rational people who truly believed there was a 1% chance that XRP could reach $10,000 in 10 years, they would bid the price of XRP at least at $20 today. Why aren’t they? Conspiracy?”
As crypto.news documented, Schwartz has also recently pushed back against theories that Ripple’s NDA agreements with banking partners indicate hidden government or central bank XRP adoption plans, calling them standard commercial confidentiality arrangements. As crypto.news tracked, Schwartz stepped back from his day-to-day CTO role at the end of 2025 and now holds a CTO Emeritus position and board advisory role, though he remains one of the most active and direct communicators in the XRP ecosystem on X. XRP was trading near $1.38 at the time of Schwartz’s latest posts.
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