The XRP Ledger reached its 15-year mark this week, tracing back to Nov. 11, 2011, when David Schwartz wrote the first lines of code for a blockchain intended to move money more efficiently than Bitcoin. The milestone arrives alongside a separate disclosure from Schwartz, now Ripple's chief technology officer emeritus, that he has cut his personal cryptocurrency holdings to a fraction of their former size.
Schwartz confirmed that his XRP wallet has fallen from roughly 26 million tokens to about 3 million. His Bitcoin position shrank from approximately 1,500 BTC to a single BTC, and his Ethereum balance dropped from nearly 40,000 ETH to six ETH. He attributed the sales to a limited appetite for financial risk rather than any loss of confidence in the network he helped build.
Note: Figures as confirmed by Schwartz and reported by CoinMarketCap.
The timing places the disclosure in the same week as the ledger's anniversary, a coincidence that gave the XRP community two topics to chew over at once. Schwartz has said in the past that the protocol was built to enable fast, inexpensive and reliable payments through a native token, and that "XRPL was not designed as a way to make XRP's price go up." That remark, made in 2025 during a community discussion about the network's design goals, has circulated widely among holders who treat the token as an investment rather than a payment rail.
The ledger's origin story runs through a small founding group. Schwartz worked with Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto on a consensus-based system that would avoid the energy-intensive mining used by Bitcoin. The network went live in June 2012. Chris Larsen joined that September, and the group incorporated as NewCoin before adopting the OpenCoin name and eventually becoming Ripple.
As part of that transition, the founders transferred 80 billion XRP to the company to fund operations and ecosystem growth. Ripple later placed about 55 billion XRP in escrow, releasing up to one billion tokens on the first of each month under a schedule meant to make supply more predictable. Over the years the ledger has broadened beyond simple transfers to support payments and other financial applications built on top of it.
November carries a second anniversary for the XRP ecosystem. Canary Capital launched its XRPC fund on Nov. 13, 2025, the first spot XRP exchange-traded fund listed in the United States. That product is now marking its first year, two days after the date tied to Schwartz's initial coding work.
On the technical side, XRPL developers have scheduled version 3.5.0 for Dec. 3, 2026. The release bundles several fixes, including a permanent correction for intermittent slow ledger closing times that had previously been addressed with temporary measures. Developers have framed the upgrade as a stability and performance matter rather than a change to the network's core economics.
For holders, the two threads of the week pull in different directions. The anniversary and the ETF's first year point to a maturing distribution channel and a network that has kept shipping updates for a decade and a half. The CTO emeritus trimming his stack, by contrast, is a reminder that the people closest to a protocol do not necessarily hold its token in the quantities outsiders assume. Schwartz's stated reasoning - risk tolerance, not conviction - does little to settle the question of what insider behavior signals about long-term price, and the disclosure is likely to be read both ways depending on the reader's existing view.
