David Schwartz (데이비드 슈워츠), former chief technology officer at Ripple, acknowledged in a recent online discussion that Ripple executives underestimated XRP's potential.

On March 17, blockchain outlet The Crypto Basic reported that Schwartz said Ripple created XRP out of financial need rather than vision. He said the company sold XRP to survive, invested in other companies and accumulated wealth. He argued Ripple created XRP because it had no money and ultimately kept selling XRP to make a living in order to accumulate wealth by buying stakes in other companies.

To show how low expectations were at the time, Schwartz said Ripple would have viewed the odds of reaching $0.25 in 2012 as about 1 in 100. He also noted that even Ripple's own investors did not bet on XRP as an asset. Given the choice, investors chose company shares instead of XRP, he said.

He also said he would have made different choices if he had expected XRP's price to rise, adding: "No one knew Ripple would keep the XRP supply and make billions of dollars." He said he saw the odds of XRP reaching $0.25 in 2012 as 1 percent and added that Ripple investors at the time also chose company shares over XRP.

Schwartz said the broader cryptocurrency market was gripped by similar skepticism. He said that even when bitcoin was $2, he saw only a 10 percent chance it would rise to $100. Ripple supporters, he said, acknowledged that even within Ripple at the time, there was no belief that XRP would reach a meaningful price.

Schwartz said: "If someone had expected XRP to reach $1.50 in 2025, they would not have sold it for 1 cent in 2017." He said he also sold 40,000 ether for $1.05. On the possibility that XRP could rise to $4 and then fall back to $0.25, he said he could not rule it out because it had previously plunged from $3 to $0.20.