XRP Ledger (XRPL) co-founder David Schwartz, known in the crypto community as JoelKatz, has announced his retirement from the position of Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at the end of this year after more than 13 years with the company.
In his address, Schwartz summarized his professional career and thanked his colleagues and the XRPL community:
“As happens in one’s life, I’ve been taking stock of my last 40 years. It’s been a wild ride. I’ve gone from consulting for the NSA to watching the early stages of Bitcoin. Then, I met Arthur [Britto], Jed [McCaleb], and Chris [Larsen] and worked on coding the XRP Ledger. Now, I’ve spent more than 13 years at Ripple.“
He emphasized that the decision to leave the day-to-day responsibilities of CTO was driven by personal motives:
“The time has come for me to step back from my day-to-day duties as Ripple CTO at the end of this year. 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 noted that he plans to remain active in the technical side of things: launching his own XRPL node, exploring new use cases for XRP beyond those developed by Ripple, and “writing code for the pure love of it.”
Despite stepping down, he will remain connected to the company:
“I’ll still be in and out of the Ripple office as CTO Emeritus, and as my last task at Ripple, Chris asked me to join Ripple’s Board of Directors to continue supporting the company’s mission and long-term vision.”
Schwartz has been working on the XRP Ledger since 2011, even before the first block was released. He also noted that he has never owned more than 26 million XRP.
Schwartz’s statement came the day after the news that Swift, the world’s largest bank payment network, had chosen Consensys-backed XRPL competitor Linea to test its on-chain messaging. This disappointed many XRP supporters who were hoping for a choice of Ripple or XRPL.
The XRP Ledger blockchain has recently published a new roadmap.