David Schwartz—better known by his online handle JoelKatz and as Ripple’s former CTO—has become the center of a heated debate in the XRP community after revealing a pattern of early exits from major crypto positions.
A striking example: Schwartz once sold 40,000 Ethereum for $1.05 apiece, a trade that returned about $42,000. Those same ETH would be worth roughly $94 million at today’s prices. He’s followed a similar playbook with Bitcoin, where he once held more than 1,000 BTC, selling most at around $1,000 and the remainder at roughly $7,500; today he holds less than one BTC. His XRP history tracks the same arc—he sold the bulk when it traded near $0.10, having said he never believed it would reach $0.25.
Those disclosures have drawn fire from parts of the XRP community, which accuse him of poor judgment or even a lack of commitment. The criticism intensified after Schwartz publicly questioned whether XRP could ever reach extreme price targets like $100 or $10,000—levels many fans treat as realistic goals.
Schwartz pushed back on X, rejecting the notion that selling an asset makes someone morally or intellectually inferior. He pointed out that everyone had the same chance to buy and sell XRP that he did, and noted he applied the same approach to Bitcoin and Ethereum without facing comparable backlash. “I utterly reject the idea that selling is somehow morally inferior to buying,” he wrote, adding that he has long believed investors should sell when it’s financially sensible—a view he traces back to the early Bitcoin community.
When a community member argued builders have a duty to hold tokens tied to their projects, Schwartz called that logic flawed. He did confirm, however, that he still holds more than 1 million XRP.
On the question of price ceilings, Schwartz offered a market-based rebuttal: if wealthy investors truly thought XRP had even a 1% chance of reaching $10,000, their buying pressure would already have driven the price far higher—he argued it would be at least $20 by now. Detractors point to his earlier skepticism about $0.25 (a target XRP has since exceeded) as reason to doubt his current forecasts.
Schwartz has stood by his comments and has not walked back his position, leaving the debate over price targets, personal selling, and what responsibility builders owe token communities very much alive.
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