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Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has pushed back against a resurfaced 2017 post in which he said XRP could not stay \u201cdirt cheap,\u201d rejecting the community\u2019s reading of it as a price guarantee and separately dismissing claims that Ripple holds any hidden mechanism to massively reprice the token.<\/p>\n
\n Summary<\/span>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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<\/a>, the original post had argued that XRP could not be \u201cdirt cheap\u201d if it were to support large-scale global transactions. Schwartz clarified<\/a> 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. \u201cI think it\u2019s very simple,\u201d Schwartz said. The number of tokens needed changes with price, but the underlying economic logic about transaction capacity does not.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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. \u201cMaybe 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,\u201d he wrote on X on May 1. \u201cBut boy, it\u2019s hard to argue that today.\u201d He posed a blunt market question to the community: \u201cIf 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\u2019t they? Conspiracy?\u201d<\/p>\n As crypto.news documented<\/a>, Schwartz has also recently pushed back against theories that Ripple\u2019s NDA agreements with banking partners indicate hidden government or central bank XRP adoption plans, calling them standard commercial confidentiality arrangements. As crypto.news tracked<\/a>, 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\u2019s latest posts.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n\n\n