David Schwartz, one of the original architects of the XRP Ledger and Ripple’s former CTO, has dismissed the idea of returning to Bitcoin development — and added fuel to the broader debate over decentralization in crypto.
The exchange began on Feb. 9 when X user Bram Kanstein pointed to XRP’s early “genesis reset” — the decision to treat the 32,750th XRP block as a practical starting point — as evidence of crypto’s centralized tendencies. Critics argue that treating a later block as a new “genesis” is a sign of governance by a small group rather than a community-led protocol.
Schwartz pushed back, reframing the argument around Bitcoin. “Bitcoin had at least two incidents that showed way more centralization than this incident did,” he replied, noting that in the XRP case “the decision…was not to make any coordinated changes and just live with it.” When another X user suggested SegWit as an example of coordinated protocol change, Schwartz countered that adding new features doesn’t necessarily prove centralization — though he conceded it could be argued either way. The incident he had in mind was the highly coordinated 2010 rollback, when Bitcoin developers reversed a block after an overflow bug created billions of invalid coins — a rare but definitive example of centralized intervention in Bitcoin’s early days.
The conversation turned more personal on Feb. 10 when Khaled Elawadi asked whether Schwartz had ever worked on, or would consider working on, Bitcoin development again. “Not really,” Schwartz answered, and expanded his critique: he called Bitcoin “largely a technological dead end,” arguing its continued dominance owes less to base-layer technical evolution than to social and monetary inertia. “The technology just doesn’t seem to matter all that much to its success, at least not at the blockchain layer,” he wrote, likening Bitcoin’s staying power to that of the dollar as a monetary standard rather than an engineering project.
For XRP proponents, Schwartz’s comments served as both a rebuttal to claims that the XRPL’s genesis reset implies outsized centralization and a reminder that Bitcoin’s “hands-off” mythology has had notable exceptions. His stance also highlights different strategic visions: Bitcoin as a resilient monetary standard whose momentum transcends base-layer upgrades, and the XRP Ledger as a platform where Schwartz continues to focus his efforts. After leaving his CTO role at Ripple, he said he would pursue projects on the XRPL.
At press time, XRP was trading at $1.38.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
