Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has pushed back on renewed claims that he once promised a higher XRP price, while also rejecting the idea that Ripple holds any hidden mechanism capable of sharply repricing the token. The dispute resurfaced around a 2017 post in which Schwartz said XRP could not remain “dirt cheap” if it were to support large-scale global payments.
Schwartz says the old post was about market mechanics
Writing on X, Schwartz said the community has continued to read that post out of context. His point, he argued, was about liquidity requirements and transaction value, not a guarantee about where XRP would trade. He used a simple comparison: if XRP is priced at $1, moving $1 million requires 1 million XRP; if XRP is priced at $1 million, the same transfer needs only 1 XRP. The token count changes with price. The economic logic behind transaction capacity does not.
Schwartz said he considered deleting the old post but chose not to. Removing it, in his view, would strip away context and create even more confusion around a debate that has already become contentious. The fact that the post is still being recirculated years later, he suggested, is part of the problem.
May 1 post rejects the idea of a hidden price lever
In a separate response on May 1, Schwartz also dismissed the claim that Ripple has some undisclosed tool or strategy that could send XRP dramatically higher and keep it there. He wrote that there may once have been a time when someone could make that argument sound “semi-plausible,” but that it is now hard to sustain after so much time has passed.
He framed the issue as a market question. If a group of very wealthy and rational people truly believed there was even a 1% chance that XRP could reach $10,000 within 10 years, he argued, they would bid the token to at least $20 today. That has not happened. Schwartz ended that line of argument with a blunt prompt to the community: “Conspiracy?”
NDA theories were also rejected in earlier comments
The latest exchange follows other recent efforts by Schwartz to counter speculation around Ripple and XRP. He has also rejected theories that Ripple’s NDA agreements with banking partners point to concealed government or central bank adoption plans for XRP, describing those agreements instead as ordinary commercial confidentiality arrangements.
According to the report, Schwartz stepped away from the day-to-day CTO role at the end of 2025 and now serves as CTO Emeritus while retaining a board advisory position. He remains one of the most active public voices in the XRP community on X. At the time of his latest posts, XRP was trading near $1.38.