Ripple’s own top engineer has thrown cold water on one of the XRP community’s most persistent theories — that the company’s 1,700 non-disclosure agreements are hiding secret, large-scale adoption plans.
Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz said those NDAs are standard business practice and that claims of massive undisclosed events are “almost always completely false.” No coordinated government plans. No hidden catalysts. Just routine confidentiality agreements.
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Veteran investor Patrick L. Riley put the 13,000-bank figure in context. With roughly 4,000-plus banks and a similar number of credit unions in the US alone, he said the total implies a wide international reach, particularly across Western financial systems.
Reports indicate XRP supporters had previously connected Ripple’s NDA disclosures — which surfaced during the SEC vs. Ripple Labs case — to those same banking partnerships. The latest figures appear to go further than what those court documents suggested.
Riley also floated a speculative framework suggesting XRP could be worth $625 per token if 20 billion XRP were responsible for moving all $12.5 trillion in annual flows.
The token currently trades around $1.37. That gap is enormous, and analysts warn the projection rests on shaky assumptions about liquidity use and token velocity.
XRP’s value, under this model, would depend less on market sentiment and more on how deeply banks actually use the token in real transactions.
That last part is the sticking point. Ripple’s payment system does not always require XRP to function. Reports note it remains unclear what share of that $12.5 trillion actually moves through XRP versus Ripple’s broader infrastructure.
Having 13,000 banks in a network is one thing. Getting them to route payments through a digital asset is another.
Schwartz Pushes Back On HypeSchwartz has been direct. He acknowledged that NDAs do involve confidentiality but said the theories building around them go well beyond what the agreements actually cover.
According to Schwartz, the idea that something earth-shattering is waiting to be revealed misreads how these arrangements work in practice.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
