Who is David Schwartz, the mastermind of XRP, who resigned as CTO 13 years later?

David Schwartz has left his daily CTO role at Ripple, but will continue to participate in the board of directors and XRPL projects. His exit has Ripple fought in a new competition with Swift and, in collaboration with Ripple’s rival, set up a blockchain ledger for cross-border payments.

David Schwartz, one of the engineers who helped build the XRP ledger, said on XPost on Tuesday, September 30th that he will step down from his daily duties as Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer at the end of the year, playing an honorary role on the company’s board of directors.

“At the end of the year, it’s time to step back from my daily duties as Ripple CTO. I’m really looking forward to spending more time with my kids and grandchildren and returning to the hobbies I’ve put aside.”

David Schwartz

The exit from Schwartz’s operational hot sheets is not a clean break as he pointed out that he plans to continue working in the XRPL community, running independent experiments and continuing coding. As Ripple CTO explains, he “tears around the sides: spinning his own XRPL nodes, publishing the output data, and investigating other use cases of XRP (like what Ripple is paying attention to).”

Currently, Schwartz is retreating from his daily CTO duties and joining the board of directors, while senior engineering VP Dennis Jarosh will take over his daily business.

“I haven’t removed weekly check-ins from my calendar…and I’m pleased that it’s not far from you when you join the Ripple board. I continue to give deep cryptography wisdom and guidance to what we’re building.

Brad Garlinghouse, CEO Ripple

The shift marks more than a decade that Schwartz helped translate encryption and secure systems engineering into live payment ledgers. Schwartz’s career in technology dates back decades.

In 1988 he founded David Schwartz Enterprises, inventing a hierarchical system for distributing workloads to multiple computers, handling interactions with the USPTO to obtain US patents 5,025,369, and marketing and managed marketing and licensing efforts.

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In early 1998, Schwartz joined Webmaster Incorporated, a Santa Clara software company, where he worked for 13 years. Starting as Director of Software Development, he designed and managed the reimplementation of Conferenceroom chat servers and related products. While at Webmaster, he also worked on projects for high security clients such as CNN and the US National Security Agency. This helped shape the ledger design and approach to validator rules.

The age of ripples

In 2011, Schwartz joined Ripple as a Chief Cryptographer and became CTO seven years later. Technically, Schwartz’s fingerprints are featured in features that highlight XRP ledgers, such as transaction costs, confirmation times, and built-in distributed exchanges, but Ripple itself is a conplise for complise for complise for complise for ablise for even the ripple itself, with X posts.

These design choices are central to the ongoing debate about how much XRPL should be run by corporate engineering compared to Ripple’s pitch to banks and payment companies and the broader validator community.

However, Schwartz’s departure is a critical time for ripples. The company has established itself as a banking solution, but recently Swift announced a partnership with Consensys, a developer of Linea and a leading supporter of Ethereum, building a conceptual prototype for Ledger.

As previously reported by Crypto.News, the initiative involves over 30 global financial institutions, including Bank of America, Citigroup, Natwest, Santander, BBVA, BNP Paribas and HSBC. Shared ledgers aim to facilitate transactions in tokenized products, including Stablecoins, and leverage blockchain capabilities such as smart contracts, transaction validation, and sequencing.

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