David Schwartz, co-founder of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) and known in the crypto community as JoelKatz, has officially announced his decision to step down as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Ripple at the end of this year after more than 13 years with the company.
This is reported by Business • Media
Reasons for the Position Change and Schwartz’s Future Role
Schwartz, who has been instrumental in the creation of the XRPL since 2011, explained that he made this decision for personal reasons. He aims to dedicate more time to his family, return to his hobbies, and focus on personal projects. At the same time, David Schwartz assured that he is not leaving the blockchain industry, and his connection with Ripple will remain strong. He will now hold the honorary title of CTO Emeritus and join the Ripple Board of Directors to support the company’s strategic direction.
“As is often the case in life, I have been reflecting on my last 40 years. It has been a wild journey. I went from consulting for the NSA to witnessing the early stages of Bitcoin. Then I met Arthur [Brito], Jed [McCaleb], and Chris [Larsen] and worked on the code for the XRP Ledger. Now I have spent over 13 years at Ripple.”
Future Plans and Impact on the XRP Community
David Schwartz emphasized that he will continue to work with XRPL technologies: he plans to launch his own node, explore new use cases for XRP beyond Ripple’s core solutions, and develop software code “for the love of it.” Despite the change in status, Schwartz stressed that he will remain an active participant in the XRP community and support its development.
According to Schwartz, he has always valued the openness and support of the Ripple and XRPL teams and highlighted his commitment to the company’s long-term mission. He also noted that he has never owned more than 26 million XRP, underscoring his transparency regarding personal investments.
It is worth noting that Schwartz’s announcement came after the banking payment network Swift decided to choose a competitor to XRPL— the Linea platform, supported by Consensys, for testing on-chain messaging. This decision sparked a wave of discussions in the XRP community, which had hoped for Ripple or XRPL to be selected as Swift’s partners.
As a reminder, XRPL recently published an updated roadmap focused on compliance, tokenization, and data privacy in blockchain.