- Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz dampens $50-$100 XRP expectations in new X post.
- He clarifies that his 8-year-old statement “XRP can’t be cheap” was in the payments and exchange context.
An XRP supporter publicly called on former Ripple Chief Technology Officer (CTO) David Schwartz on There are always wild theories circulating on crypto Twitter as to why an XRP price of $100 is realistic or “unavoidable” in the long term.
Can the XRP price realistically reach $100?
Schwartz, who resigned as Ripple CTO at the end of 2025, did not want to meet the demand directly – but did not contradict the core statement either. Schwartz wrotehe doesn’t feel comfortable commenting on such a statement:
“I don’t feel comfortable saying something like that. While I don’t think it’s likely, I also didn’t think it was likely that XRP would ever reach $0.25. I started selling XRP at $0.10 because it seemed absurd. I remember when Bitcoin at $100 seemed like an impossible dream.”
The crucial point of his answer: If a relevant number of rational investors were to seriously price in three-digit XRP prices, this should already be reflected in the market price today. According to this logic, anyone who sees a real chance of triple-digit XRP prices and risks capital for it would have to act differently than many are currently doing.
“If many rational people believed that there was a 10% chance of XRP reaching $100 within a few years, they would definitely not sell for much less than $10 today,” Schwartz wrote, adding:
“Those with this belief would quickly buy up most of XRP because they place a higher value on it than those without this belief – and soon the supply of XRP would dry up well below $10.”
For Schwartz, exactly that – a price well below 10 dollars – is already a signal: only a few believe in a “10% chance of 100 dollars” with enough conviction to position their money accordingly.
“The fact that the current trading price is well below $10 shows that there are not very many people who actually believe there is a 10% chance of reaching $100 within a few years – with enough conviction to position their money accordingly,” said Schwartz.
Anyone who claims the opposite is “not telling the truth”. According to Schwartz, the thought game can be calculated as desired using other target prices, probabilities and time windows.
In another X post, Schwartz was asked about an earlier sentence of his that is often quoted in XRP circles to argue that the price must be much higher in the long term. It’s about Schwartz’s oft-quoted sentence: “XRP can’t be cheap.” In November 2017, he wrote via X: “It can’t be dirt cheap. That doesn’t make sense […] higher prices make payments cheaper.”
It *can’t* be dirt cheap. That doesn’t make any sense. 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. 1/2
— David ‚JoelKatz‘ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) November 20, 2017
Since then, this phrase has attracted a lot of speculation in the XRP community. Yesterday, Schwartz added that his statement was not aimed at speculation, but at usage costs in the payment and exchange context.
“This means that a low price for XRP actually makes it more expensive to use for payments and on exchanges,” he replied. He did not provide a detailed derivation in the post.
In closing, Schwartz made it clear that he doesn’t think crypto prices are fundamentally irrational: most of the time they reflected a “reasonable analysis” of possible future prices and associated probabilities. He explained strong rallies with external changes that were difficult to model – not with clearly derivable price targets such as $100.
No Comments