Ripple Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz said on X that if XRP ever reaches $4, a later decline to $0.20 to $0.25 cannot be ruled out. He described that outcome as unlikely, but he did not dismiss it. Instead, he pointed back to XRP’s own trading history as evidence that sharp reversals have happened before.
A direct question led to a blunt answer
The exchange began when an X user asked whether XRP, after potentially climbing to $4, could then fall back into the $0.25 to $0.31 range. Schwartz replied by referencing an earlier cycle. XRP had already risen to $3 and later dropped to $0.20, he said, which means a similar move cannot be declared impossible.
He added that such a collapse would be unlikely in his view. Still, he also said many of the price moves that actually occurred in XRP’s history were themselves events he would have considered unlikely at the time. That line stood out because it framed XRP’s price record as a series of outcomes that repeatedly exceeded expectations in both directions.
“Nobody believed XRP would be worth this much”
In the same thread, Schwartz responded to criticism that Ripple created XRP mainly to sell it repeatedly and enrich insiders. His reply did not center on a hard denial. He said that if the team had really been able to see the future, they probably would have done many things differently.
Schwartz wrote that, as far as he knows, nobody believed for a long time that Ripple would be able to hold so much of the supply and make billions of dollars by selling it later. The comment suggested that in his telling, XRP’s eventual valuation and the scale of Ripple’s sales were not assumptions built into the project from the start.
He used his own crypto mistakes to make the point
Schwartz widened the discussion by recalling his early views on the broader crypto market. When Bitcoin was around $2, he said, if someone had asked him about the odds of it ever reaching $100, he probably would have put the chance at only 10%. His point was simple: even people deeply involved in crypto have often underestimated how far prices could go.
He also disclosed that he sold 40,000 ETH at $1.05 because he genuinely believed the rally was over at that level. According to the article, those holdings would be worth around $80 million at current Ethereum prices. Schwartz raised the example not to dwell on a missed gain, but to show how often even well-informed participants misread price trajectories, on the upside and on the downside.
He closed with another historical comparison. If anyone had believed XRP would be worth $1.50 in 2025, he said, they would not have sold it for $0.01 in 2017. The remark matched the thread’s central message: crypto price history has repeatedly produced outcomes that looked improbable before they happened.