A look at Ripple CTO David Schwartz’s history with X reveals a new change at the beginning of 2026.
Last September, Schwartz announced that he would be stepping away from his day-to-day duties as Ripple CTO at the end of 2025. Schwartz, the original architect of the XRP Ledger, said that as he transitions to CTO Emeritus, he will now focus on family and personal projects related to XRP.
Schwartz’s X bio has been updated to reflect this change and now includes “CTO Emeritus, Ripple.”
Schwartz said that as his final job at Ripple, he accepted an invitation from Ripple Chairman Chris Larsen to join the Ripple Board of Directors. Schwartz also announced that he will become an advisor to XRP financial company Evernorth later this year.
Amid all this, Schwartz, now CTO emeritus, says he remains an important part of the XRP community. Schwartz reiterated that he has no intention of leaving the XRP community, participating in the XRP Ledger through an XRP node that has been up for several months, publishing its output data, and researching other use cases for XRP outside of what Ripple is focused on.
In June 2012, Schwartz launched the XRP Ledger with Arthur Britto and Jed McCaleb.
Instagram has been warned
As the crypto community reflects on the new phase of Ripple’s emeritus CTO, he issued an important warning about Instagram impersonators.
Currently a member of the Ripple Board of Directors, his years of experience as Ripple CTO and the fact that he was one of the original architects of the XRP ledger have made him sought after on social media by members of the cryptocurrency community looking to leverage his wealth of knowledge.
User X, who also appears to be a member of the XRP token community, had notified Schwartz to tag him on Instagram.
Schwartz responded that he hardly uses Instagram and warned against imposters and scammers. “I hardly ever use Instagram, and there’s a 99.8% chance that anyone claiming to be me there is a scammer,” Schwartz said.
