Ripple chief technology officer David “JoelKatz” Schwartz has resurfaced a years-long thread of speculation around Bitcoin’s origins and his own pre-Ripple work with US government agencies, clarifying once again that he neither possessed “high level” intelligence nor claims special insight into Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity—while acknowledging that a US intelligence provenance for Bitcoin is “not a terrible theory.”
I never got anything even remotely resembling high level information. I had to certify that the thing I was working on would meet the NSA’s requirements without even being allowed to see most of them.
He then shared vignettes about the compartmentalization he encountered. “One requirement that I was allowed to see was that you had to be able to stop it from processing classified data if you lost control over it. I was puzzled—if you lost control over it, by definition you can’t stop it, right? It was explained to me that that’s…” He also noted signage he wasn’t permitted to have explained: “They wouldn’t even tell me why there’s little signs all over the place (generally on entrances or containers) that can be set to ‘OPEN’ or ‘CLOSED’ and what ‘OPEN’ and ‘CLOSED’ mean on those signs.”
Schwartz further recounted how, at one point, he recognized the user interface of “one thing I worked on” not through briefings but “because late one night I happened to have the Discovery Channel on and saw our UI on a screen.” He clarified the lineage of that code: “To be precise, that was work I did (on the same core code) for NATO shortly before I adapted it for the NSA. I don’t remember how I found out what the NSA was using it for. I don’t think I should reveal the exact uses, but they’re pretty boring.”
Asked when his nondisclosure agreement would expire, he answered: “I have no idea. They didn’t let me keep a copy and I don’t remember—if I ever even knew. I just hope nobody really cares any more. Plus, I never really knew anything all that secret.”
The through-line between the 2022 and 2025 messages is clear: a willingness to treat state-origin hypotheses for Bitcoin as plausible without endorsing them. “There is nothing inherently wrong with not being Satoshi,” the Ripple CTO emphasized in 2022. By 2025, his clarifications around the nature of his NSA and NATO work add color but not conspiracy: process-driven engineering inside a tightly siloed environment, limited visibility into end use, and no privileged window into intelligence secrets.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.42.
