XRP has never lacked lofty price targets, but the latest comments around a possible move to $10,000 have led to a direct response from one of the most familiar voices in the Ripple ecosystem. David Schwartz, Ripple’s former chief technology officer and one of the original architects of the XRP Ledger, has pushed back against the idea by pointing to a simple market question. According to him, if serious capital truly believed in even a small chance of that outcome, why is XRP still trading at its current level?
David Schwartz Challenges The $10,000 XRP Predictions
The XRP community has long been home to some of the most ambitious price forecasts in crypto. Numbers like $10,000, $20,000, and above circulate regularly on social media, often backed by the outlook of financial institutions adopting the XRP Ledger for facilitating payments.
David Schwartz, who departed as Ripple CTO in December 2025, addressed the $10,000 XRP prediction head-on during a discussion on X earlier this week. The motivation for Schwartz’s comments was a question from an X user who asked him to respond to valuation theories built around a crypto adaptation of analyst Chris Burniske’s equation of Price = PQ / (V × S). Some market commentators have used the model to support very high projections for digital assets, including XRP.
According to Schwartz, if there were a few very rich and very rational people who really believed that there was a 1% chance that XRP could hit $10,000 in 10 years, then they would’ve bid XRP up to at least $20 today. A move to $20 would still be huge from XRP’s current level, but it is nowhere near $10,000.
The Gag Order Claim
At the time of writing, XRP is trading $1.41, with a market cap of $86.7 billion and a circulating supply of about 61.8 billion tokens. At $10,000 per XRP, that same circulating supply would imply a valuation around $618 trillion. Therefore, the point made by Schwartz is that even a remote chance of such a massive future price and market should already be attracting aggressive buying from large investors if it were credible.
The conversation did not stop at XRP price predictions. Schwartz also addressed suggestions that he may be restricted from speaking fully about XRP or Ripple. He noted that he has never signed any agreement that required him to lie, adding that he would choose silence or avoidance over giving an answer he did not believe was truthful and accurate.
Schwartz also took aim at claims that Ripple holds an undisclosed mechanism that will one day be revealed and send the XRP price above $100. “For one thing, circumstances have changed so much that it’s hard to imagine we’ve held onto this magic switch for so long and it’s still just waiting to go,” he said.
Interestingly, this is not the first time Schwartz has spoken against ultra-bullish XRP price predictions. Back in January, he pointed out that even a modest chance of XRP reaching $100 within a few years would already be reflected in its current price.