Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz dismissed renewed claims that XRP could hit $10,000, arguing that the market itself is already allowing for a reality check on such extreme price targets. During the exchange on Platform X, Schwartz framed the issue less as a debate of faith than as a matter of rational capital allocation: If sophisticated investors truly saw even a slight chance of such an outcome, why hasn’t the price of XRP already moved much higher?

Schwartz denies XRP Moonshot claims

The discussion started after user X he asked Schwartz to comment on theories built around a cryptographic adaptation of Chris Burniske’s Price = PQ/(V × S) model, which some XRP proponents have used to argue for a possible $10,000 XRP. Schwartz responded with a plain, market-based objection.

“If there were a few very rich, very rational people who truly believed there was a 1% chance that XRP could reach $10,000 in 10 years, they would offer XRP at least $20 today,” Schwartz wrote. “Why isn’t it? Conspiracy?”

It wasn’t just that $10,000 was a gigantic number. Schwartz’s argument was that if the expected value of such a target were credible to rational, well-capitalized investors, they would not wait passively. Even assigning only a compact probability to a huge future price would, in his view, be enough to justify aggressive buying at much higher levels than the current market is sustaining.

This answer directly addresses one of the recurring assumptions underlying XRP’s ultra-bullish forecasts: that the market has not priced in future institutional utility, settlement demand, or some hidden Ripple strategy. Schwartz’s response suggested that markets may be imperfect, but they are not so inert that major pools of capital would ignore asymmetric opportunities of this scale if they thought them even remotely likely.

The debate then moved on to another notable claim in XRP circles: that Ripple itself can operate its own products, including Ripple Prime or treasury-related flows, to dramatically augment the value of the asset. One user asked why Ripple wouldn’t “use its own stuff” through these channels and suggested it could push XRP above $100.
Schwartz rejected the idea that Ripple still has some unused mechanism capable of massively revaluing XRP on demand.

“There may have been a point in time when you could reasonably argue that Ripple had an easy way to massively drive up the price of XRP for good, but it was simply waiting for the right moment to maximize something,” he wrote. “But boy, it’s hard to argue that today. First of all, circumstances have changed so much that it’s hard to imagine that we’ve held onto this magic switch for so long and it’s still just waiting to kick in.”

He added that Ripple has already explained its strategy, although the company does not reveal all internal details. “We explained what we were doing, why we were doing it and what we hoped to achieve,” Schwartz wrote. “While we’re not transparent about everything, we’re not hiding any grand conspiracy. At least not as far as I know.”

Another user argued that wealthy investors often focus on asset protection rather than high-risk bets. Schwartz responded that this represents a misunderstanding of how immense pools of capital often behave. “The way rich people protect their wealth is by taking more risks than other people are willing to take,” he replied.

The exchange continued when another user suggested that ultra-wealthy buyers would accumulate XRP over the counter rather than on centralized exchanges, limiting any evident impact on price. Schwartz acknowledged that this may initially be true, but argued that it would not change the broader conclusion. “In the beginning,” he wrote. “But they wouldn’t stop until they changed the price or ran out of money.”

At press time, XRP was trading at $1.3749.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com