Ripple Vet Defends Controversial 2017 XRP Price Take

Ripple vet David Schwartz, who frequently interacts with members of the XRP community on X, has defended a widely debated 2017 social media thread regarding the price of the major altcoin. 

This came after an X user accused Schwartz of spending his time “fooling the XRP community” and asking if the Ripple vet planned on deleting his old statements.

‘XRP can’t be dirt cheap’ 

Back in November 2017, Schwartz tweeted that XRP cannot be “dirt cheap” if it were to handle massive global transaction volumes.

“It can’t be dirt cheap. That doesn’t make any sense,” Schwartz wrote in 2017. “If XRP costs $1, they’d need a million XRP which would cost $1 million. If XRP cost a million dollars, they’d need one XRP which would, again, cost $1 million.”

Schwartz continues to stand by this nine-year-old economic assessment. However, he has admitted he has considered deleting the original tweets due to rampant price speculation within the community. 

According to the Ripple vet, the post is widely misinterpreted as a price prediction, but he insists that removing it and the context around it “would do more harm than good.”

His explanation of liquidity and market depth was never meant to be taken as a guarantee of future value.

“I think it’s very simple,” Schwartz stated. “But somehow people seem to think it’s a price prediction or evidence that XRP was designed to have a high price (whatever that even means).”

Deleting the Arbitrum posts 

Earlier in the week, Schwartz deleted a series of posts regarding the Arbitrum Security Council’s controversial decision to freeze over 30,000 ETH tied to the KelpDAO exploit. 

Initially, Schwartz had defended the network intervention. In fact, he actually compared Arbitrum’s actions to the famous 2010 “value overflow incident.” 

However, he then walked back this statement and deleted the posts after “confusing Arbitrum with a different type of L2.”