XRP Ledger co-founder will step down as Ripple’s CTO after 13 years

• David Schwartz has announced that he is stepping down as Ripple’s CTO after 13 years.
• However, he will become CTO Emeritus and join the Ripple Board of Directors.
• Although he mentioned personal reasons for this, Schwartz will continue to work with the blockchain.

XRP Ledger (XRPL) co-founder David Schwartz, known in the crypto community as JoelKatz, has announced his retirement from the position of Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at the end of this year after more than 13 years with the company.

In his address, Schwartz summarized his professional career and thanked his colleagues and the XRPL community:

He emphasized that the decision to leave the day-to-day responsibilities of CTO was driven by personal motives:

Schwartz noted that he plans to remain active in the technical side of things: launching his own XRPL node, exploring new use cases for XRP beyond those developed by Ripple, and “writing code for the pure love of it.”

Despite stepping down, he will remain connected to the company:

Schwartz has been working on the XRP Ledger since 2011, even before the first block was released. He also noted that he has never owned more than 26 million XRP.

Schwartz’s statement came the day after the news that Swift, the world’s largest bank payment network, had chosen Consensys-backed XRPL competitor Linea to test its on-chain messaging. This disappointed many XRP supporters who were hoping for a choice of Ripple or XRPL.

The XRP Ledger blockchain has recently published a new roadmap.