David Schwartz, former Ripple CTO and current Chief Technology Officer Emeritus, has publicly cast doubt on the recurring claim that XRP could eventually reach $10,000 per token. In a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter), Schwartz argued that if sophisticated, well-capitalized investors genuinely believed there was even a remote chance of such an outcome, they would have already bid the price up significantly higher.
Schwartz posed a simple but pointed question: “If there were a few very rich, very rational people who really believed that there was a 1% chance that XRP could hit $10K in 10 years, they’d bid XRP up to at least $20 today. Why aren’t they? Conspiracy?” He used this reasoning to suggest that the market itself refutes the feasibility of such extreme price targets, as no meaningful buying pressure exists at levels far below $20.
The debate began after an X user asked Schwartz to comment on price models derived from Chris Burniske’s Price = PQ / (V × S) framework, which some XRP proponents have used to support the $10,000 thesis. Schwartz dismissed the argument by focusing on market behavior rather than mathematical abstractions.
When a user suggested that Ripple could use its own products—such as Ripple Prime or treasury-related flows—to push XRP above $100, Schwartz rejected the idea. “Maybe 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 to maximize something or other,” he wrote. “But boy, it’s hard to argue that today. For one thing, circumstances have changed so much that it’s hard to imagine we’ve held onto this magic switch for so long and it’s still just waiting to go.”
Schwartz also pushed back against the notion that wealthy investors primarily focus on wealth preservation rather than high-risk bets. “The way rich people preserve wealth is by taking bigger risks than other people can stand to take,” he countered. When another user argued that large buyers might accumulate XRP over-the-counter (OTC) to avoid visible price impact, Schwartz conceded that could happen initially but warned that “they wouldn’t stop until they had moved the price or run out of money.”
Schwartz has openly admitted that he personally de-risked his finances by selling a significant portion of his XRP holdings at just $0.10 per token. “I started selling XRP at $0.10 because it seemed insane,” he explained. He also clarified that Ripple does not hold any hidden mechanism to artificially inflate XRP’s price. “We’ve explained what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what we hope to achieve. While we aren’t transparent about everything, we’re not hiding some grand conspiracy. At least not as far as I know,” Schwartz stated.
At the time of writing, XRP is trading at approximately $1.38, down 63% from its all-time high set ten months ago.
