David Schwartz steps back.

Ripple's longtime CTO, David Schwartz, announced he's stepping down after over a decade, though he'll stay on the Board of Directors.

Schwartz is an original architect of the XRP Ledger. His work shaped how XRPL handles consensus, transactions, and features like escrow and amendment governance. Few figures in crypto combine both technical capacity and the patience to push innovation forward for 13 years.

There are big shoes to fill, but Ripple has a track record of managing leadership transitions well and keeping engineering priorities moving. The XRPL community continues to evolve, with recent amendments like Credentials and Deep Freeze showing the protocol is still adding enterprise functionality.

This moment is both a thank-you and a reminder: XRPL was built to outlast any single leader, even one as foundational as David Schwartz.