David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO Emeritus, has offered a detailed explanation regarding the timeline of his XRP compensation, addressing a long-standing point of confusion within the XRP community. In a recent exchange on X, Schwartz responded to a shared document detailing early participant rewards by clarifying that, unlike the company’s founders, he received XRP much later.
“I’m not generally considered a founder of Ripple and did not receive any XRP as compensation until much, much later,” Schwartz stated. His comment highlights the critical distinction between his role in creating the XRP Ledger and the founding of Ripple as a company. While Schwartz was a central architect of the XRP Ledger—having worked alongside Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto in 2011 to build a digital asset network optimized for payments—the company’s formation followed a different path. The XRP Ledger launched in June 2012, and shortly after, Chris Larsen joined to establish NewCoin, which later became OpenCoin and ultimately Ripple.
Schwartz’s compensation structure reflected this separation: he was not among the early participants whose XRP allocations had been publicly discussed. The clarification comes after Schwartz transitioned from his role as CTO (a position he held from 2018 until late 2025) to CTO Emeritus. His remarks provide important context about the formative years of Ripple and reinforce that the XRP Ledger’s creation and the company’s founding involved different individuals with distinct compensation arrangements.
