David Schwartz Says XRPL Success Would Give XRP a Significant Value Share

Gas Use Is Not the Price Engine

If the XRP Ledger ever won adoption on a mass scale, a significant fraction of the value created would accrue to XRP, and that, not any burn from transaction fees, is where David Schwartz locates the token's potential upside. Schwartz, Ripple's former chief technology officer and one of the original architects of the ledger, pushed back on Monday against a claim that keeps resurfacing across the wider XRP ecosystem: that XRP's role as the network's native gas asset should be the main force lifting the XRP price. Schwartz answered in a Monday post on X: “I don’t think anybody who knows anything has said that the use of XRP as gas will be a major driver of the price of XRP.” He directed readers back to a November 2025 post in which he set out the mechanism he does believe in: increased use and adoption of XRPL adds value to XRP through the asset's privileged place on the ledger. The properties he named are what do that work: XRP carries no counterparty risk, belongs to no single jurisdiction, and holds a special role in the ledger's autobridging feature, the routine by which XRPL settles a trade between two assets through an intermediate one when direct liquidity is thin, with XRP sometimes serving as that intermediate. For an altcoin argued over as fiercely as this one, the distinction is structural rather than cosmetic: fees on XRPL run to fractions of a cent, so fee demand alone was never going to be a price engine, while the bridging and settlement role scales with whatever volume the network attracts. His conclusion was conditional: it is hard, he wrote, to imagine a world where XRPL succeeds and XRP does not capture a good fraction of that value. He paired that with an older caveat: the ledger was not designed to push the token's price higher, and the founding goal was a fast, cheap payment system with a native digital asset and a built-in decentralized exchange.

@JoelKatz · X post

In a Monday post on X.

View on X

Holder Frustration Builds at $1.09

The intervention lands in a down market. XRP traded near $1.09 on Monday, and market data shows a loss of more than 12% across the last seven days, a slide that has fed visible frustration among holders who waited years for the asset to break out. Whether the drop marks a broader bear market stretch or XRP-specific selling is not settled by any record in front of us; what the week shows is a community asking, once more, what is supposed to hold the valuation up. The frustration is not new either: holders have spent months debating the token's place in Ripple's ever-expanding ecosystem, and Monday's exchange is only the latest round. Schwartz's answer cuts both ways. In a separate exchange with critics, he put his own effect on the market close to nil: “Do I have anything to do with the price of XRP? Honestly? I guess probably not anything. But very little.” That admission sits at odds with the weight parts of the community put on executive commentary, and it rules out reading Monday's post as an attempt to talk the token up. Traders working from levels rather than narratives can follow our XRP technical analysis desk, and a separate study found the token higher after 12 of 17 oversold readings since 2023. The same debate keeps reaching for older reference points, from Standard Chartered's $28 XRP forecast, which carries a $1 bear case for 2030, to Schwartz's own 2.5 million XRP sale, disclosed with a $1.7 million tax bill, while a planned 2027 ledger overhaul aimed at higher throughput sits behind the adoption question he now faces.

What the Claim Requires

The primary record here is the X post itself, and it establishes less than the reaction to it suggests. Schwartz did not forecast a price or a date; he rejected one mechanism, fee demand, and offered another, the asset's structural position, whose payoff only arrives if adoption arrives first. That conditional is the load-bearing part for anyone pricing XRP at $1.09 today: the market is not currently paying for the scenario he describes, and nothing in his argument shortens the wait. A second distinction follows from his own framing: XRP is not a governance token, and the value case runs through settlement and bridging roles that exist whether or not any fee narrative circulates. That much of Monday's post holds regardless of where the chart goes next.