David Schwartz, the former CTO of Ripple and one of the original architects of the
The stock exchange began as a battle over history and governance. On February 9, X user Bram Kanstein argued that XRP’s early “genesis reset” – often described as treating the 32,750th block of Kanstein wrote that the milestone “can be seen as the genesis,” before adding, “But it isn’t. The XRP Genesis reset is a prime example of the centralized nature of ‘CrYpTO’.”
Ex-Ripple CTO Schwartz Calls Bitcoin a ‘Tech Impasse’
Schwartz interjected with an analogy that shifted the argument to Bitcoin. “Bitcoin had at least two incidents that showed much more centralization than this incident,” he wrote, “mainly because the decision in this incident was not to make any coordinated changes and just live with it.”
That claim was followed up by X-user, who put forward SegWit as a candidate for what Schwartz meant: an example of coordinated protocol change. Ripple’s former CTO pushed back on that framework: “I didn’t do that because I don’t really think about adding new features as a show of centralization,” he replied. “But I think you can make a good argument that it is. The biggest thing that came to my mind was the coordinated rollback of 2010.”
The tone of the thread changed on February 10 when
“Not really,” Schwartz replied. He then went further and outlined an argument that Bitcoin’s dominance owes less to the evolution of its base layer technology than to social and monetary inertia. “I think bitcoin is largely a technological dead end for the same reason as the dollar,” he wrote. “The technology just doesn’t seem to matter much to its success, at least not at the blockchain layer.”
For XRP proponents, Schwartz’s comments served two purposes at once: a defense against charges that XRPL’s early history implies unique centralization, and a reminder that Bitcoin’s “hands-off” mythology had real-world exceptions in its early days.
What’s hard to miss is where the ex-Ripple CTO draws the line. Bitcoin’s success may continue even if technical progress at the base layer slows, as the power of the network increasingly behaves like a monetary standard rather than a technical project. Schwartz is pursuing a different strategy for the XRP Ledger. After stepping down as CTO of Ripple, he announced that he would continue his own projects on the XRP Ledger.
At the time of writing, XRP was trading at $1.38.
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