Ripple’s chief technical visionary David Schwartz is returning to the big stage. At the anniversary conference Ripple Swell 2026, which kicks off in New York on October 27, the XRP Ledger co-creator will make his first appearance in his new capacity as CTO Emeritus.
Schwartz stepped away from the company’s operational leadership to take a seat on the board of directors, but he is now set to address the key challenge facing the ecosystem: can XRPL as payment rail compete in today’s market?
For the crypto community, his appearance on the main stage for a keynote address is an unexpected and significant move. After stepping down as CTO, the market did not expect Schwartz to return so quickly to presenting the company’s technological strategy publicly.
On October 28 at 4:30 p.m. ET, he will hold a fireside chat titled “Building What’s Next for XRPL” with Ayo Akinyele, RippleX’s head of engineering and a computer science Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University specializing in applied cryptography, private zk-transfers, and AI infrastructure.
AI, privacy, and Matt Damon: What Ripple is preparing for its anniversary conference
In essence, the market will see a presentation of the network’s new technological framework, from the integration of AI tools to privacy-preserving transactions at the ledger level.
This time, Ripple is undertaking a serious experiment by bringing together the purely financial Swell forum with the engineering summit Apex and the academic platform UBRI Connect. Around 1,500 participants will gather at The Shed cultural center.
The speaker lineup confirms this balance. Alongside Schwartz, former NYSE President Tom Farley, BNY’s Head of Global Markets Laide Majiyagbe, and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse will take the stage. The unexpected addition is Hollywood actor Matt Damon: his Water.org foundation plans to use the new dollar-pegged stablecoin RLUSD for microfinance missions in Asia and Africa.
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The market backdrop adds a dose of hard pragmatism to Schwartz’s session. XRP closed the third quarter with a powerful 46% rally, settling around $1.53 with a market capitalization approaching $97 billion. Against this backdrop, investors expect the Ripple technology patriarch to deliver not routine forecasts, but concrete commitments in code.
The network needs technical guarantees to bring fully fledged financial markets onto the blockchain, and Schwartz will have to prove that the XRPL architecture is ready for it.
