Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has pushed back against claims that he misled XRP holders, after a 2017 XRP discussion resurfaced on X. Schwartz said the old post was meant to explain liquidity needs and transaction scale, not to offer a future XRP price target or a promise about valuation.
The renewed dispute began after a user accused him of misleading the XRP community. At the center of the argument was a 2017 thread where Schwartz discussed why XRP could not remain extremely cheap if it were used to handle very large global transaction flows. He said that point has since been turned into something he never intended: a prediction of XRP’s future market price.
Old liquidity example returns to the spotlight
In the original post, Schwartz wrote that XRP could not be “dirt cheap” if it were moving large amounts of value. He used a simple comparison to make the point: if XRP traded at $1, moving $1 million would require 1 million XRP; if XRP traded at $1 million, then one XRP could move that same amount. His recent explanation is that this was a liquidity illustration, not a forecast.
Schwartz said many users have treated the thread as evidence that XRP was built to reach a very high price. He rejected that reading and said the post was about market mechanics, transaction capacity, and market depth. In his view, people are assigning a guarantee to a statement that was never framed that way.
Schwartz says deleting the thread would remove context
He also argued that deleting the old discussion would not solve the confusion. If anything, he suggested, removing it could strip away context and make the debate worse. That point matters because the thread has continued to circulate for years, often detached from the explanation he says he was trying to give at the time.
The exchange shows how older XRP commentary still shapes community arguments long after it was first posted. The disagreement is not really about whether the words exist. It is about whether those words described a basic liquidity constraint or implied a view on where XRP should eventually trade.
Deleted Arbitrum posts drew added attention
The discussion gained more attention after Schwartz deleted separate posts about Arbitrum and its move to freeze more than 30,000 ETH tied to the KelpDAO exploit. He had initially defended the intervention and compared it to Bitcoin’s 2010 value overflow incident.
Schwartz later said he removed those posts because he had confused Arbitrum with another type of layer 2 network. That deletion brought extra scrutiny to his recent comments on X, while XRP holders kept debating how his earlier statements should be interpreted.
His position has remained the same throughout the latest exchange: the 2017 remarks were about liquidity, transaction throughput, and market depth, not an XRP price prediction.