Former #Ripple CTO David Schwartz says it is now very hard to argue that Ripple holds any hidden tool capable of pushing the XRP price up dramatically.
He argued that after everything Ripple and XRP have been through over the years, it is very hard for anyone to still argue convincingly that such a tool exists but simply has not been used yet.
Key Points
David Schwartz suggests it is now difficult to argue that Ripple has a way to shoot up the XRP price but has not yet used it.
He says Ripple has openly explained its strategy and is not hiding any grand conspiracy.
According to Elon Musk, while a few crypto assets have merit, most of them are scams.
Schwartz agrees with this but says there is no agreement within the crypto community on which assets are genuine.
David Schwartz: Ripple Has No Way to Shoot up the XRP Price
Responding to community inquiries on X, Schwartz admitted that there may have been a time, early on, when someone could make a somewhat believable case that Ripple had a simple, hidden way to push XRP’s price up dramatically and was just holding off for the right moment.
However, he said that given how much has changed since then, it is nearly impossible to believe that Ripple has been sitting on such a tool for this long without ever using it.
The former Ripple CTO then noted that Ripple has been open about what it is doing, the reasoning behind it, and what it is ultimately trying to accomplish. He noted that while the company does not share every detail publicly, it is not hiding any “grand conspiracy,” at least none that he knows of.
This was important because it addressed a narrative that has persisted among some XRP holders, which suggested that Ripple has some switch to flip to push XRP’s price up. Schwartz essentially dismantles this idea by pointing out how unrealistic it would be to keep something like that hidden for so long.
The Prospect of Ripple Influencing XRP’s Price
Notably, he shared these thoughts while responding to community members during a conversation triggered by an Elon Musk comment.
Musk had said that while a few crypto assets have real value, most of them are scams. Responding, Schwartz noted that while most people always agree that most crypto assets are scams, there is no agreement among them on which crypto tokens actually have merit.
When the conversation moved to XRP’s price prospects, a community member asked why Ripple would not simply use its own products, such as Ripple Prime and Ripple Treasury, to carry out transactions in XRP, suggesting that this could push the token’s price past $100.
This question led to Schwartz’s recent comments. According to him, there is no solid reason to believe Ripple has a direct way to control or boost XRP’s price like that, considering how long the firm has gone without actually doing that.
The Escrow Burn Idea
Responding to Schwartz, some in the community suggested that Ripple could actually help push up XRP’s price by announcing plans to burn the tokens sitting in its escrow accounts. For context, Ripple has 33 billion XRP in escrow.
Notably, Schwartz has responded to this idea before on several occasions, and each time he has called attention to what the Stellar Development Foundation did as a reference point.
In November 2019, the SDF burned 55 billion XLM tokens, which was more than half of the token’s entire supply. Despite the scale of this burn, it did nothing for XLM’s price. The token kept following the broader market just as it had before, and it even moved alongside XRP.
Schwartz has leveraged this instance consistently to make the point that burning Ripple’s escrowed XRP would not move the needle on price and would ultimately just be a waste of funds.