Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz pushed back against renewed claims that XRP could reach $10,000, arguing that the market itself already provides a reality check on such extreme price targets. In an exchange on X, Schwartz framed the issue less as a debate over belief and more as a question of rational capital allocation: if sophisticated investors truly saw even a small chance of that outcome, why has XRP not already been priced far higher?
Schwartz Pushes Back on XRP Moonshot Claims“If there were a few very rich, very rational people who really believed that there was a 1% chance that XRP could hit $10K in 10 years, they’d bid XRP up to at least $20 today,” Schwartz wrote. “Why aren’t they? Conspiracy?”
The point was not merely that $10,000 is a large number. Schwartz’s argument was that if the expected value of such a target were credible to rational, well-capitalized investors, they would not wait passively. Even assigning only a small probability to a massive future price would, in his reasoning, be enough to justify aggressive buying at far higher levels than the current market has sustained.
“Maybe there was one time when you could semi-plausibly argue that Ripple had some easy way to shoot up the price of XRP massively for good but was just waiting for the right time to maximize something or other,” he wrote. “But boy, it’s hard to argue that today. For one thing, circumstances have changed so much that it’s hard to imagine we’ve held onto this magic switch for so long and it’s still just waiting to go.”
He added that Ripple has already explained its strategy, even if the company does not disclose every internal detail. “We’ve explained what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what we hope to achieve,” Schwartz wrote. “While we aren’t transparent about everything, we’re not hiding some grand conspiracy. At least not as far as I know.”
The exchange continued when another user suggested that very wealthy buyers would accumulate XRP over the counter rather than on centralized exchanges, limiting visible price impact. Schwartz conceded that could be true initially, but argued it would not change the broader conclusion. “At first,” he wrote. “But they wouldn’t stop until they had moved the price or run out of money.”
At press time, XRP traded at $1.3749.
