Ex-Ripple CTO David “JoelKatz” Schwartz pushed back on viral XRP price calls, arguing that today’s market price is already a referendum on how much credible capital actually believes in a near-term path to $100. His comments also spilled into a broader discussion about XRPL economics and scaling tradeoffs that, in his view, get lost in the hype cycle.
Can XRP Reach $100?“I don’t feel comfortable saying something like that,” Schwartz wrote. “While I don’t think it’s likely, I didn’t think it was likely that XRP would ever hit $0.25. I started selling XRP at $0.10 because it seemed insane. I remember when bitcoin hitting $100 seemed like an impossible dream.”
“If many rational people believed that there was a 10% chance that XRP hit $100 within a few years, they definitely wouldn’t sell very much today at much less than $10,” he said. “Those with that belief would quickly buy up most of the XRP, because they’d value it more highly than those without that belief, and soon the supply of XRP well below $10 would dry up.”
He emphasized that readers can “do that same math” with different odds, time frames, and target prices. In a final note, Schwartz argued his baseline assumption is that crypto markets are “rational most of the time,” with major bull runs typically catalyzed by “unpredictable external changes,” rather than widely telegraphed certainties.
The implication is mechanical: if XRP’s price is lower, more units are required to represent the same value in flight, potentially impacting how the asset is used across payment and exchange flows.
Scaling The XRP LedgerSchwartz also addressed concerns about XRPL throughput after a user questioned whether “1500 per second (theoretical) is sufficient,” asking about ways to increase on-chain transactions per second. Schwartz said higher TPS is possible, but warned that most approaches shift costs onto node operators.
“There are ways, but I don’t think you really want to,” he wrote. “Almost any way you do it imposes costs on everyone who runs a node. They have to receive more transactions, process and store more transactions, and relay more transactions to others.”
He argued that decentralization pressure shows up when node costs rise without a matching benefit, and suggested a different optimization target: “This is why I think it makes more sense to try to increase the value of each transaction rather than trying to increase the number of transactions you can support.” With XRPL fees “so low,” he added, many transactions are “very low in value,” leaving room to “get more useful transactions on XRPL, even crowding out the worthless ones,” before throughput becomes the binding constraint.
At press time, XRP traded at $1.76.
