David Schwartz, Ripple CTO Emeritus and one of the key architects of XRP Ledger, has dispelled rumors of him launching his own independent startup. Responding to questions from the XRP community about plans for going solo after he officially changed his role at Ripple at the end of 2025, Schwartz, in his characteristic ironic manner, stated that he is "too lazy" for that.

Nevertheless, he is not sitting idle and is instead of building a new project on the basis of XRP Ledger, as well as focusing on maintaining the stability of the existing network.

Why XRPL node might be too fast for its own good

This week, for the first time in a long while, Schwartz published data on the performance of his personal XRPL node over the past 14 days, which, incidentally, sparked an intense discussion about imperfections in the rippled code on which XRP Ledger is built.

As a result of the discussion, Schwartz acknowledged the existence of an ironic bug, if it can be called that, where two servers located in the same data center operate so perfectly with minimal latency that the XRPL protection algorithm may interpret their high-speed data exchange as a DDoS attack and terminate the connection. 

Schwartz’s transition to the status of CTO Emeritus became a notable event not only for Ripple but for the crypto industry as a whole. While XRP is trading in the range of $1.30, theoretical battles with the SEC have definitively moved into the past. Schwartz de facto remains the ultimate arbiter of whether XRPL operates as intended.

In this context, his refusal to create his own project can be interpreted as a positive signal for investors, as the main thinker behind Ripple does not intend to fragment liquidity and market attention, remaining committed to the architecture he has been building for more than a decade.