Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has pushed back against a 2017 repost in which he said XRP could not remain “dirt cheap,” rejecting public reading as a guarantee of value and separately dismissing claims that Ripple holds any hidden mechanism to return the token.
Summary
- A 2017 post said XRP would not be cheap if it handled large volumes of transactions worldwide, but Schwartz said the comment was about how liquidity needs and transaction volume are related.
- Schwartz said he considered removing the post but decided against it, saying removing it would cause more confusion than less, and it continues to be taken out of context years after it was written.
- On May 1, Schwartz separately dismissed the idea that Ripple is maintaining a hidden tool to increase the value of XRP, saying that the argument was unheard of but now impossible to support given how much time has passed.
David Schwartz addressed the ongoing controversy on X after a user accused him of intentionally misleading XRP owners and asked if he would remove a 2017 comment. As crypto.news reported, the original post reserved that XRP cannot be “dirt cheap” if it is to support global exchanges. Schwartz clarified the post was about market mechanics: if XRP is trading at $1, the user needs one million tokens to move $1 million; if XRP is trading at $1 million, one token is moving the same amount. “I think it’s very simple,” Schwartz said. The number of tokens needed changes with price, but basic economic logic about transaction volume does not.
He refused to delete the old post, saying it would remove useful context and add confusion to an already contentious discussion. On the recent claim that Ripple has a hidden lever to drive XRP higher, Schwartz was right. “There was probably a time when you could clearly argue that Ripple had an easy way to increase the price of XRP significantly but was waiting for the right moment,” he wrote on X on May 1. “But boy, it’s hard to argue with that today.” He asked the public a burning question of the market: “If there were a few very rich, very rational people who really believed that there was a 1% chance that XRP could reach $10,000 in 10 years, they would price XRP at least $20 today. Why aren’t they there? Conspiracy?”
As crypto.news was written, Schwartz also recently refuted the ideas that Ripple’s NDA agreements with banking partners point to hidden government or XRP master bank acquisition programs, which he calls normal commercial secrecy programs. As crypto.news tracked, Schwartz stepped down from his day-to-day CTO role at the end of 2025 and now holds the position of CTO Emeritus and the role of board advisor, although he remains one of the most active and direct communicators in the XRP ecosystem on X. XRP was trading near $1.38 during the recent postssrtz.
