Ex-Ripple CTO David “JoelKatz” Schwartz pushed back on viral XRP price calls, 
arguing that today’s market price is already a referendum on how much credible 
capital actually believes in a near-term path to $100. His comments also 
spilled into a broader discussion about XRPL economics and scaling tradeoffs 
that, in his view, get lost in the hype cycle. Can XRP Reach $100? Schwartz 
was responding to an X user urging him to tell “xrp supporters” that XRP 
&#8220;can&#8217;t and won&#8217;t go to 50-100$,” warning that “So many people get poor with 
investing in xrp.” Schwartz declined to make an absolute claim, but framed the 
debate in probabilistic terms, pointing to his own history of being surprised 
by crypto’s upside. Related Reading: 21Shares Drops 3 XRP Price Predictions 
For 2026: What’s The Upside? “I don&#8217;t feel comfortable saying something like 
that,” Schwartz wrote. “While I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s likely, I didn&#8217;t think it was 
likely that XRP would ever hit $0.25. I started selling XRP at $0.10 because 
it seemed insane. I remember when bitcoin hitting $100 seemed like an 
impossible dream.” Rather than debating narratives, Schwartz offered a market- 
math thought experiment: if rational investors truly believed there was a 
meaningful chance of XRP reaching $100 within a few years, the current price 
would not sit far below double digits for long. “If many rational people 
believed that there was a 10% chance that XRP hit $100 within a few years, 
they definitely wouldn&#8217;t sell very much today at much less than $10,” he said. 
“Those with that belief would quickly buy up most of the XRP, because they&#8217;d 
value it more highly than those without that belief, and soon the supply of 
XRP well below $10 would dry up.” Schwartz then drew his conclusion from the 
gap between the hypothetical and the tape. “That the current trading price is 
well below $10 shows that there aren&#8217;t very many people who really think it 
has a 10% chance of hitting $100 within a few years with enough confidence to 
put their money where their mouth is,” he wrote, adding: “So anyone who says 
otherwise is not telling the truth.” He emphasized that readers can “do that 
same math” with different odds, time frames, and target prices. In a final 
note, Schwartz argued his baseline assumption is that crypto markets are 
“rational most of the time,” with major bull runs typically catalyzed by 
“unpredictable external changes,” rather than widely telegraphed certainties. 
Related Reading: XRP Risk-Adjusted Returns Signal Consolidation Rather Than 
Trend Formation – Details In a separate reply, Schwartz revisited an older 
famous X post by himself where he said that XRP “can’t be cheap.” Asked what 
he meant by this, he answered: “It means that a low price for XRP actually 
makes it more expensive to use for payments and exchanges.” The implication is 
mechanical: if XRP’s price is lower, more units are required to represent the 
same value in flight, potentially impacting how the asset is used across 
payment and exchange flows. Scaling The XRP Ledger Schwartz also addressed 
concerns about XRPL throughput after a user questioned whether “1500 per 
second (theoretical) is sufficient,” asking about ways to increase on-chain 
transactions per second. Schwartz said higher TPS is possible, but warned that 
most approaches shift costs onto node operators. “There are ways, but I don&#8217;t 
think you really want to,” he wrote. “Almost any way you do it imposes costs 
on everyone who runs a node. They have to receive more transactions, process 
and store more transactions, and relay more transactions to others.” He argued 
that decentralization pressure shows up when node costs rise without a 
matching benefit, and suggested a different optimization target: “This is why 
I think it makes more sense to try to increase the value of each transaction 
rather than trying to increase the number of transactions you can support.” 
With XRPL fees “so low,” he added, many transactions are “very low in value,” 
leaving room to “get more useful transactions on XRPL, even crowding out the 
worthless ones,” before throughput becomes the binding constraint. At press 
time, XRP traded at $1.76. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from 
TradingView.com

XRP To $100? Ex-Ripple CTO David Schwartz Weighs In On The Hype

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