Ripple CTO Lauds XRPL Infrastructure Amid Claims of XRP Price Manipulation

Ripple CTO David Schwartz has shown confidence in the XRPL’s infrastructure, praising its growth. This came after fresh claims emerged about possible XRP price manipulation.

Ripple CTO Praises XRPL’s Long-Term Foundation

In a recent post, Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz described the XRP Ledger as a cornerstone for the future of digital finance. He noted that while many new players in payments and stablecoins are building their blockchains, the XRPL has a 13-year track record of real-world adoption and developer support.

Schwartz underlined that starting a blockchain is tough, but building a lasting ecosystem with trust and liquidity is even harder.  XRPL has overcome this obstacle by being “battle-tested” and updated frequently.

XRPL operates as a public, permissionless network with optional features to meet regulatory needs. This allows for both decentralization and compliance.

He emphasized a few key advantages of the design, such as minimal transaction costs. Schwartz also added that XRPL enables users to pay directly with XRP and eliminates the need for an additional gas token. He believes that these characteristics improve XRPL’s efficiency and facilitate international financial transactions.

Looking ahead, the Ripple CTO had earlier revealed plans to set up a high-performance XRPL server to support UNL validators and other network services. He clarified that this move would be his initiative, not an official Ripple project.

XRP Price Manipulation Claims Surface

Grape, a validator operator, claims to have identified suspicious large-volume transactions that may be artificially influencing the XRP price.

According to Grape, only about 150–170 validators are actively securing the XRPL mainnet. Using a custom Python tool to monitor payments exceeding 10,000 XRP, he reported seeing massive transfers of over 140,000 XRP  occurring every few minutes, often between known exchange addresses such as Bitget and Binance.

These patterns, Grape argues, could be a form of wash trading. This is where some parties manipulate trading metrics in the crypto market by moving large amounts between different platforms. While this is illegal in regulated markets, the lack of enforcement in the crypto space may allow these actions to continue. This can create false impressions of demand, trigger trading algorithms, and affect prices.

Despite concerns about XRP price manipulation, the XRPL ecosystem is growing quickly. A report by Token Relations and Ripple shows that the value of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) on XRPL increased from $5 million in January to over $118 million by July. This is a massive increase of 2,260% in just six months.

The network’s foundations remain solid, despite the ongoing controversy surrounding XRP price manipulation.  The Ripple CTO’s advocacy for infrastructure upgrades could further solidify XRPL’s standing as a significant market participant.