XRP Rallies as Key XRPL Architect Schwartz Steps Back from Ripple CTO Role

XRP pushed higher on Wednesday, Oct. 1, gaining more than 4% in the past 24 hours, after Ripple’s longtime chief technology officer David Schwartz said he will step back from his role at the company.

Schwartz, who’s been Ripple CTO for more than a decade, announced in an X post on Tuesday that he will step back from his daily role by the end of the year.

After the announcement, the price of XRP rose 4.1% in 24 hours to $2.94, and is up 2.2% over the past week.

While the exact reason behind the departure remains unclear, Schwartz said he plans to spend more time with his family and also hinted he will stay close to the XRP ecosystem.

“I’m really looking forward to spending more time with the kids and grandkids and going back to the hobbies I set aside. But be warned, I’m not going away from the XRP community. You haven’t seen the last of me (now, or ever),” Schwartz wrote in the X post.

Schwartz also confirmed that he will join Ripple’s board of directors and keep working on the XRP Ledger, or XRPL, which he helped launch as one of the blockchain’s key architects.

XRPL Brings New Updates

In late July, Schwartz admitted that XRP’s adoption “has been very slow” but attributed it partly to compliance, pointing out that “Even Ripple can’t use the XRPL DEX for payments yet because we can’t be sure a terrorist won’t provide the liquidity for payment.”

In August, The Defiant reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alongside Ripple jointly dropped their appeals, effectively ending a five-year legal battle that started in 2020, when the SEC sued Ripple for selling XRP, the native token of Ripple’s payment network, as unregistered securities.

Meanwhile, XRP Ledger is pushing further to woo blockchain developers with a new token standard on the mainnet, designed to boost DeFi adoption.

According to XRPL’s documentation, the new standard, so-called Multi-Purpose Tokens — or just MPTs — are a type of fungible token on XRPL that allows developers to create tokens with such features as compliance, control, and metadata built in without extra code needed.