David Schwartz

David Schwartz.

David Schwartz is an American software engineer and cryptographer, one of the three original architects of the XRP Ledger. As of 29 October 2026, Ripple lists him as a board member, while its 2026 event material uses the title CTO emeritus. He is no longer the company's operating chief technology officer.

XRP Ledger

In 2011, Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto began developing the system that became the XRP Ledger. The ledger launched in June 2012. After the launch, the founders transferred 80 billion of the 100 billion created XRP to the company then called NewCoin and soon renamed OpenCoin. Schwartz served as OpenCoin's chief cryptography officer.

The project’s own history separates development of the ledger from formation of the company. It dates the NewCoin company to September 2012, after the ledger’s launch, and identifies Chris Larsen as its CEO, McCaleb as CTO, Schwartz as chief cryptography officer and Britto as an adviser. These earlier roles were distinct from Schwartz’s later position as CTO.

Career at Ripple

Schwartz later became Ripple's chief technology officer in July 2018. In September 2025 he announced that he would step back from daily duties at the end of that year, become CTO emeritus and join Ripple's board. Ripple's current leadership page lists him only in the board section; Dennis Jarosch took responsibility for technical operations.

Earlier technical work

In a 2020 Block Stars retrospective with Stefan Thomas, Ripple described Schwartz as an experienced C++ developer who had experimented with Bitcoin Core and helped early contributors through the Bitcoin forum. The interview connected their interest in a new ledger with proposed changes to Bitcoin that would have required difficult coordination over hard forks. This is a retrospective account of his technical interests, not evidence that he created Bitcoin or held a formal leadership role in that project.

Before the XRP Ledger, Schwartz worked on distributed computing and other software systems. A 1988 patent application credited to David J. Schwartz and assigned to David Schwartz Enterprises described a multilevel system for distributing parts of a computing task; U.S. patent 5,025,369 was granted in 1991. He also publishes code under the handle JoelKatz.

The patent describes dividing a computing task into portions and assigning them among available computers arranged in levels. Work that cannot be handled at one level can be passed to another. Its subject is cooperative distributed processing; it does not describe an XRP token, a cryptocurrency ledger or the later XRPL consensus design. The filing and grant dates distinguish the earlier invention from his subsequent payment-network work.

Consensus work

Schwartz co-authored the 2014 paper The Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm with Noah Youngs and Arthur Britto. It described an early form of the protocol using overlapping sets of trusted validators. The hosted paper now carries a warning that it does not represent the current ledger protocol and directs readers to a 2018 analysis for updated safety and liveness conditions.

In the current design, each server chooses validators it trusts not to collude, commonly described as a Unique Node List. Validators exchange proposals about transactions for the next ledger version; a server validates a result when the required overlap and agreement thresholds are met. If agreement cannot be reached, the design favors stopping progress over confirming divergent ledger histories.

The distinction between the historical paper and the evolving protocol is important when describing Schwartz's work. He was an original designer and published an influential early explanation, but present network behavior is defined by deployed open-source software, validator configuration and later protocol research rather than by that paper alone.

The later analysis was written by Brad Chase and Ethan MacBrough, not by the three authors of the 2014 paper. It examines conditions under which the protocol maintains safety and liveness despite potentially faulty participants and different trusted-node lists. These are conditional protocol properties, dependent on the stated assumptions; describing Schwartz’s historical authorship should not turn either paper into an unconditional guarantee about every network configuration.

Public technical activity

The verified JoelKatz GitHub profile links Schwartz to public repositories and technical experiments. It is useful evidence for the pseudonym and his public development activity, but individual repository ownership should not be interpreted as proof that he alone created every component of the XRP Ledger.

Selected protocol proposals

Schwartz is a named co-author of XLS-20, the proposal for native non-fungible token support, alongside Aanchal Malhotra and Nikolaos D. Bougalis. The specification is dated 24 May 2021 and describes ledger objects and transaction operations for creating, holding, transferring and destroying individual tokens. This provides a specific example of his later protocol-design work while preserving the distinction between proposal authorship, implementation and the network’s decision to enable a feature.

XLS-30, dated 30 June 2022, names Malhotra and Schwartz as co-authors of the automated market maker proposal. It describes liquidity pools integrated with the ledger’s existing order-book exchange, pool-share tokens and an auction mechanism offering discounted trading fees to an auction-slot holder. The design is a protocol feature, not a separate exchange operated by Schwartz. The XRPL community’s March 2024 introduction credits the proposal and subsequent work and feedback from numerous contributors; authorship does not imply that the two authors alone built or deployed the feature.

Ripple, XRP and the XRP Ledger

Ripple is a company; the XRP Ledger is an open-source network; XRP is the ledger's native asset. Schwartz's role in designing the ledger does not mean that he alone controls the network, and his current Ripple board position should not be confused with his former executive post.

A design proposal or a Ripple job title does not by itself activate a change on the XRP Ledger. The documented amendment process first requires implementation in server software and then sustained support from a supermajority of trusted validators for two weeks. Validator operators configure amendment votes; individual servers cannot simply enable a network amendment on their own. This separates Schwartz’s influence as an engineer and public advocate from the protocol’s activation mechanism.