Ex-Ripple CTO David “JoelKatz” Schwartz pushed back on viral XRP price calls, arguing that today’s market price is already a referendum on how much credible capital actually believes in a near-term path to $100. His comments also spilled into a broader discussion about XRPL economics and scaling tradeoffs that, in his view, get lost in the hype cycle.
Can XRP Reach $100?
Schwartz was responding to an X user urging him to tell “xrp supporters” that XRP “can’t and won’t go to 50-100$,” warning that “So many people get poor with investing in xrp.” Schwartz declined to make an absolute claim, but framed the debate in probabilistic terms, pointing to his own history of being surprised by crypto’s upside.
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“I don’t feel comfortable saying something like that,” Schwartz wrote. “While I don’t think it’s likely, I didn’t think it was likely that XRP would ever hit $0.25. I started selling XRP at $0.10 because it seemed insane. I remember when bitcoin hitting $100 seemed like an impossible dream.”
Rather than debating narratives, Schwartz offered a market-math thought experiment: if rational investors truly believed there was a meaningful chance of XRP reaching $100 within a few years, the current price would not sit far below double digits for long.
“If many rational people believed that there was a 10% chance that XRP hit $100 within a few years, they definitely wouldn’t sell very much today at much less than $10,” he said. “Those with that belief would quickly buy up most of the XRP, because they’d value it more highly than those without that belief, and soon the supply of XRP well below $10 would dry up.”
Schwartz then drew his conclusion from the gap between the hypothetical and the tape. “That the current trading price is well below $10 shows that there aren’t very many people who really think it has a 10% chance of hitting $100 within a few years with enough confidence to put their money where their mouth is,” he wrote, adding: “So anyone who says otherwise is not telling the truth.”
He emphasized that readers can “do that same math” with different odds, time frames, and target prices. In a final note, Schwartz argued his baseline assumption is that crypto markets are “rational most of the time,” with major bull runs typically catalyzed by “unpredictable external changes,” rather than widely telegraphed certainties.
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In a separate reply, Schwartz revisited an older famous X post by himself where he said that XRP “can’t be cheap.” Asked what he meant by this, he answered: “It means that a low price for XRP actually makes it more expensive to use for payments and exchanges.”
The implication is mechanical: if XRP’s price is lower, more units are required to represent the same value in flight, potentially impacting how the asset is used across payment and exchange flows.
Scaling The XRP Ledger
Schwartz also addressed concerns about XRPL throughput after a user questioned whether “1500 per second (theoretical) is sufficient,” asking about ways to increase on-chain transactions per second. Schwartz said higher TPS is possible, but warned that most approaches shift costs onto node operators.
“There are ways, but I don’t think you really want to,” he wrote. “Almost any way you do it imposes costs on everyone who runs a node. They have to receive more transactions, process and store more transactions, and relay more transactions to others.”
He argued that decentralization pressure shows up when node costs rise without a matching benefit, and suggested a different optimization target: “This is why I think it makes more sense to try to increase the value of each transaction rather than trying to increase the number of transactions you can support.” With XRPL fees “so low,” he added, many transactions are “very low in value,” leaving room to “get more useful transactions on XRPL, even crowding out the worthless ones,” before throughput becomes the binding constraint.
At press time, XRP traded at $1.76.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
