Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz argued that large internet companies will inevitably adopt blockchain-based finance, contending that decentralized infrastructure is arriving “at the right place at the right time” to meet needs that legacy rails struggle to serve. The remarks came in Episode 1 of Ripple’s new Onchain Economy video series, published on September 25. In the segment, Schwartz frames decentralized finance as a practical response to unmet enterprise demand rather than a speculative detour.
Schwartz also distances his argument from the narrower, speculative corners of crypto. “It can’t just be collectibles and it can’t just be… seeking very high reward at very high risk,” he cautions, before asserting that DeFi—broadly defined to include smart contracts and the infrastructure around them—will “take a huge bite out of TradFi over the next couple of years.” The condition, in his telling, is straightforward: the blockchain sector must ship services people actually want from a financial system, and do so with institutional-grade guardrails.
That bridge between decentralization and compliance is the crux of the episode. “I don’t think there’s a tension between institutional adoption and decentralization,” Schwartz says. What institutions want from a base layer, he argues, is the very thing public chains offer: neutrality. “Ecosystems are interested in layer-1 blockchains because of their decentralization, because of their neutrality… institutions will see that the neutrality of blockchains is a positive rather than a negative.” In other words, neutrality is not a governance liability; it is the feature that allows multiple counterparties to cooperate without surrendering control to a single gatekeeper.
Schwartz’s comments land amid Ripple’s broader push to position XRPL as a venue for institutional on-chain finance—stablecoin flows, tokenized assets, and eventually native credit—supported by compliance-enabling primitives.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.76.
