David “JoelKatz” Schwartz — Ripple’s former CTO and one of the most recognizable figures in the XRP community — is under fresh scrutiny for his history of early exits and recent public doubts about XRP’s upside.
A striking example: years ago Schwartz sold 40,000 ETH at about $1.05 apiece, netting roughly $42,000. Those same tokens would be worth roughly $94 million at today’s prices. That trade is part of a pattern. Schwartz has said he once held more than 1,000 BTC, selling the bulk around $1,000 and most of the rest near $7,500; he now holds less than one bitcoin. His XRP history follows a similar arc — he sold most of his XRP when it was about $0.10, a level he didn’t expect to reach $0.25.
Those disclosures have drawn criticism from parts of the XRP community, especially after Schwartz publicly questioned whether XRP could ever hit sky-high targets such as $100 or $10,000 — price milestones some supporters treat as realistic.
Schwartz pushed back on X (formerly Twitter). “I utterly reject the idea that selling is somehow morally inferior to buying,” he wrote on May 5, 2026, arguing that everyone had the same opportunity to buy or sell XRP and that he applied the same approach to Bitcoin and Ethereum without comparable backlash. He added that he’s long believed people should sell when it benefits them financially, a principle he traces to the culture of the early Bitcoin community that attracted him.
When community members argued that builders have a duty to hold tokens tied to projects they helped create, Schwartz dismissed that logic. He did confirm he still holds more than 1 million XRP.
Schwartz also made a market-driven case for his skepticism about extreme price targets: if a cohort of wealthy investors genuinely believed XRP had even a 1% chance of reaching $10,000, he reasoned, they would already be accumulating the token — and that buying pressure would have pushed the price far higher, he said, estimating it would be at least $20 by now. Critics counter that his earlier disbelief that XRP could reach $0.25 — a level it later exceeded — undermines his current read on the token’s ceiling.
For now, Schwartz has not retracted his statements. The exchange highlights tensions that persist across crypto communities: the line between personal financial decisions and expectations for founders or builders, and how public commentary from influential figures can fuel debate around token narratives and price targets.
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