David Schwartz has firmly denied speculation that he plans to launch an independent startup on the XRP Ledger after stepping back from his CTO role at Ripple at the end of 2025. Responding to the XRP community, he humorously remarked that he is “too lazy” to pursue a solo venture, shutting down the rumors in his typical ironic style.
Despite this, Schwartz is far from inactive. He continues contributing to the XRPL ecosystem by working on new initiatives built on the ledger while also prioritizing the stability and maintenance of the existing network. His ongoing involvement signals that, even without a formal executive role, he remains a key technical figure behind XRPL’s development.
Recently, Schwartz shared performance data from his personal XRPL node over a 14-day period, which triggered deeper technical discussions within the community. The data highlighted an unusual edge case in the XRPL infrastructure related to the “rippled” codebase.
He acknowledged a somewhat ironic flaw: when two servers located in the same data center communicate with extremely low latency and near-perfect synchronization, the network’s security system may misinterpret this unusually fast data exchange as a potential DDoS attack. As a result, the system could automatically sever the connection between them.
This issue underscores a broader point about high-performance distributed systems—extreme efficiency can sometimes appear abnormal to built-in security mechanisms. Schwartz’s transparency in sharing such insights has sparked constructive debate among developers about how to refine XRPL’s resilience without compromising its speed and efficiency.
$XRP
