XRP Ledger Co-Architect David Schwartz Confirms Ripple Board Seat

Retired, but Still on Ripple's Board

David Schwartz, who helped design the XRP Ledger from its earliest days, has confirmed that he no longer works for Ripple but still holds a seat on the company's Board of Directors. The clarification came on Tuesday in an X exchange that began when a user asked whether Schwartz was still serving Ripple as a non-executive director. His reply was blunt: “I don't work for Ripple anymore,” followed shortly after by a plain “I retired.” Pressed on what his position actually was, Schwartz, who posts under the long-standing JoelKatz handle, wrote on X that he sits on the Board of Directors and carries the CTO Emeritus title, adding that he still meets his former team twice a month and drops in at Ripple offices unannounced to say hello. The emeritus title dates to the end of December 2025, when Schwartz stepped out of the day-to-day operating CTO role he had held since July 2018 and moved onto the board at the same time. Before that, he had served as Ripple's chief cryptographer from 2011, which makes him the longest-tenured technologist in the company's recent leadership. A CTO Emeritus designation keeps a former senior technology executive attached to a company for institutional memory and strategic input, without day-to-day management duties. Non-executive directors, the role the user's question referenced, attend board meetings and vote on oversight but do not run operations. The status question carried weight across the XRP ecosystem because Ripple is the company most identified with the XRP price over the past decade, and a full exit by the ledger's founding architect would have been a change of a different order. Tuesday's comments settled it: the board seat and the emeritus title are still his.

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Node, Evernorth and Swell Ties

Retirement has not pulled Schwartz away from the network he helped build. He said his own XRP node has been running for several months, that he still publishes the data it produces, and that he is researching use cases for XRP beyond the areas Ripple focuses on. A node is software connected to the XRP Ledger that verifies transactions and relays network data, so operating one keeps Schwartz engaged at the protocol level rather than only through Ripple's boardroom. The output he publishes also gives developers outside Ripple a technical reference independent of the company, and the distinction matters because Ripple's commercial priorities do not cover everything the ledger can do, which is exactly the gap Schwartz says he is probing. The detail lands for a token that trades across virtually every major crypto exchange and still ranks among the largest assets by market cap: the person who co-designed the ledger's core remains an active participant in its operation. Schwartz's post-Ripple schedule reaches beyond the company, too. After the Ripple-backed XRP treasury firm Evernorth, built to hold XRP on its balance sheet, was revealed publicly, he announced he would serve as a strategic advisor to the firm. And at Swell, Ripple's annual gathering held at the end of October, Schwartz appeared on stage with Ayo Akinyele, Head of Engineering for RippleX, to discuss the ledger's next stage. The session covered the technologies steering the ledger's development, the design trade-offs involved, and the requirements for supporting next-generation financial and on-chain applications. Unlike tokens distributed later through an IDO, the XRP Ledger launched with its full supply created at the outset, and Schwartz was among the small group who designed how it would function, a structure that has defined the asset's economics since. Between the node, the advisory seat and the Swell panel, his calendar still runs through the ecosystem he helped create.

Why the Board Seat Matters

The useful signal in Tuesday's exchange is continuity. Schwartz has now put on record that stepping back from Ripple's operating side did not mean distance from Ripple's board, from Evernorth or from the XRP Ledger itself. He has steered the ledger's design through every bear and bull market since 2011, and the roles he listed, board director, CTO Emeritus, Evernorth advisor and independent node operator, keep that experience inside the ecosystem. For XRP holders the relevant fact is narrower: the ledger's founding architect remains an active participant, and the man who ran Ripple's technology for seven and a half years still votes on the company's oversight. The emeritus title, held quietly since December 2025, now has a clear public definition.