David Schwartz Says No One Expecting XRP to Reach $1.5 Would’ve Sold for Pennies in 2017

David Schwartz, Ripple’s former CTO, has admitted that Ripple executives underestimated the potential of XRP in the early days.

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Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz made a series of honest admissions during a recent online discussion, revealing that he and other Ripple executives never truly believed XRP would reach the heights it has today. 

Key Points

• Schwartz confirmed that back in 2012, he estimated the odds of XRP ever reaching $0.25 at just 1 in 100, and even Ripple’s own investors preferred company equity over XRP allocations.
• He also revealed that when Bitcoin was trading at $2, he gave it only a 10% chance of ever hitting $100, showing that skepticism ran across the entire crypto industry at the time.
• He admitted that no one at Ripple believed the company could hold onto so much of the XRP supply and eventually make billions from selling it, at least not until much later.
• When asked about XRP’s price floor, Schwartz noted that XRP had already climbed to $3 before falling to $0.20, and a drop to the $0.25 to $0.31 range is unlikely but not impossible if it hit $4.

Schwartz Admits He and Other Ripple Execs Underestimated XRP 

The former Ripple CTO made these comments while engaging in discussions around censorship. During the conversation, one investor argued that Ripple did not create XRP out of vision but due to financial need. 

He claimed that Ripple created XRP because they had no money and simply kept selling XRP to stay afloat, eventually buying stakes in other companies and building wealth along the way. 

In response, Schwartz said that if he and his colleagues had known what was coming for XRP with regard to its price appreciation, they would have done many things differently. He confirmed that, to his knowledge, no one at Ripple truly believed the company could hold onto so much of the XRP supply and eventually make billions from selling it.

I wish we had been able to see the future like that. We probably would have done a lot of things differently. But nobody, at least as far as I know, believed that Ripple could hold on to so much of the supply and make billions of dollars selling it until *much* later. If you had…

— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) March 16, 2026

To show just how low expectations were back then, Schwartz said that in 2012, he would have put the odds of XRP ever reaching $0.25 at roughly 1 in 100. He also noted that even Ripple’s own investors were not betting on XRP as an asset. When given the choice, those investors opted for company equity instead of XRP.

The Skepticism Cut Across the Entire Crypto Market

Schwartz also confirmed that this cut across the entire crypto market. He shared that when he first got into the space, and Bitcoin was sitting at just $2, he thought there was only about a 10% chance it would ever hit $100. This shows that the skepticism was not unique to XRP.

Responding to these comments, a Ripple supporter said Schwartz’s honesty confirmed what many had already suspected, that even the people who built XRP and ran Ripple never truly believed the asset would reach meaningful price levels. 

Schwartz admitted that he and others had underestimated XRP. According to him, if anyone had genuinely believed XRP would be worth $1.50 in 2025, they would never have sold it for a penny back in 2017. He then revealed that he personally sold 40,000 ETH at $1.05 because he thought the price had already topped out. 

It's true. If anyone thought XRP was going to be $1.50 in 2025, they wouldn't have sold it for a penny in 2017. I sold 40,000 ETH at $1.05 because I thought the rise was over.

— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) March 16, 2026

Could XRP Still Drop to $0.25 After Hitting $4?

When someone in the discussion asked whether XRP could fall back to the $0.25 to $0.31 range if it ever climbed to $4, Schwartz pointed out that XRP had previously risen to $3 before dropping all the way down to $0.20, so ruling out a similar move would be hard to justify. However, he said such a drop would be unlikely.

Reports show that when early allocations were handed out at Ripple, Schwartz chose company equity over XRP tokens, believing at the time that ownership in Ripple was the better call. He has since admitted that this was probably not the right move, since XRP would have been more liquid than the Ripple shares.