According to David Schwartz, the chief architect of the XRP Ledger and Ripple’s CTO Emeritus, most people who hold or follow XRP do not know what its underlying network was built to do.
Schwartz spoke at Nasdaq during the celebration of Evernorth’s public listing. He said the most common misunderstanding is about where the XRP Ledger sits among the major blockchains. In his view, it has more functionality than Bitcoin but less than Ethereum or Solana, and that middle position is deliberate.
Schwartz described the ledger as built for a narrow set of financial tasks rather than general-purpose computing. Those tasks include:
He said this focus makes the network strong for some use cases and a poor fit for others. It does not support every application a developer might write. Instead, the ledger comes with what he called curated financial primitives, designed to meet the standards financial institutions expect.
Asked why a bank or financial firm should build on the network, Schwartz gave three reasons:
Schwartz said XRP Ledger supporters should not expect a single-chain outcome. Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin runs on the XRP Ledger, but he said it also needs to be on other networks to reach more users and deeper liquidity.
He explained the goal in personal terms. People leave money idle in bank accounts, he said, because moving it somewhere it can earn a return takes effort. He wants the industry to reach a point where users think only about what their money is doing, not where it sits.
On artificial intelligence, Schwartz said high-volume payments between AI agents may run on fast, low-cost payment channels, with final settlement on a blockchain. He expects some countries to become net buyers of AI services and others net sellers. Settling those imbalances, he said, will require a neutral settlement network. He did not say that network would be the XRP Ledger.
Looking ahead to 2027, Schwartz pointed to Ripple’s acquisitions of GTreasury and Hidden Road. He said Ripple is combining them into one business. It plans to cross-sell products to clients who already move trillions of dollars through systems that do not touch crypto.
Schwartz said the Evernorth listing shows crypto connecting with traditional finance. It gives investors a way to hold XRP through retirement accounts and on corporate balance sheets.
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