Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer just said something that the XRP community is not going to stop talking about. In a candid and unusually honest exchange on X, David Schwartz, acknowledged that a collapse from a possible $4 to as low as $0.20 or $0.25 cannot be ruled out, while simultaneously admitting that nobody at Ripple, including himself, ever believed XRP would become as valuable as it did.
The Question That Started It
A user asked Schwartz directly whether XRP, if it ever reached $4, could subsequently crash to between $0.25 and $0.31. Schwartz did not dismiss the question with the kind of polished corporate response you might expect from a senior executive at one of the most high-profile companies in crypto.
Instead he pointed directly at history. “It went up to $3 and then down to $0.20,” he said, “so you can’t really say that’s not possible. I’d say that’s unlikely, but I’d say that all the things that have actually happened to the price are unlikely too.”
That last sentence is the one worth sitting with. The CTO of Ripple is essentially saying that XRP’s entire price history has been a sequence of events he would have considered improbable at every stage.
“Nobody Believed XRP Would Be Worth This Much”
The more revealing part of the thread came earlier, when Schwartz addressed a pointed criticism that Ripple had created XRP purely as a fundraising mechanism to enrich its founders and executives.
One user argued that Ripple invented XRP simply to sell it repeatedly and accumulate wealth. Schwartz pushed back but in a way that was more honest than defensive.
“I wish we had been able to see the future like that,” he wrote. “We probably would have done a lot of things differently. But nobody, at least as far as I know, believed that Ripple could hold on to so much of the supply and make billions of dollars selling it until much later.”
He went further, extending the point across the entire early crypto industry. “When I first got into the space and Bitcoin was at $2, if you had asked me the chances of it ever hitting $100, I probably would have said 10%.”
The $1.05 Ethereum Sale
The admission that landed hardest was personal. Schwartz revealed that he sold 40,000 Ethereum at $1.05 because he genuinely believed the price rise was over at that point.
At current Ethereum prices, those 40,000 ETH would be worth in the region of $80 million. His point was not to lament the sale but to illustrate how consistently wrong even the most informed people in crypto have been about price trajectories, in both directions.
“If anyone thought XRP was going to be $1.50 in 2025,” he said, “they wouldn’t have sold it for a penny in 2017.”
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