David Schwartz, the CTO Emeritus of Ripple and a key architect of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), has publicly shut down speculation about launching an independent startup. Responding to community rumors following his formal transition to the emeritus role at the end of 2025, Schwartz stated in his characteristic ironic manner that he is "too lazy" for such an endeavor.
Despite the change in title, Schwartz remains deeply involved in the XRPL ecosystem. He clarified that instead of building a new project from scratch, his focus is on developing on the existing XRPL foundation and maintaining the network's operational stability.
The discussion was sparked when Schwartz published performance data from his personal XRPL node for the first time in a long while, covering a 14-day period. This led to an intense technical debate about the rippled codebase. A notable, ironic bug was identified: two servers located in the same data center can operate with such minimal latency that the XRPL's protection algorithm mistakenly interprets their high-speed data exchange as a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack and terminates the connection. Schwartz acknowledged this efficiency-driven flaw.
With XRP trading around $1.30 and major legal battles with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the past, Schwartz remains the de facto ultimate technical authority for the XRPL. His decision to forgo a solo venture is seen as a positive signal for the ecosystem, indicating no intention to fragment market attention or liquidity away from the protocol he has helped build for over a decade.
