TL;DR
- Schwartz sparked fresh debate on X in a casual thread, revisiting how XRP and Ripple history was shaped by happenstance.
- He said he cannot be definitive, but guessed Arthur Britto coined “drop,” and described Britto’s intellect as another plane, asking him to slow down.
- He also said Ripple got ripple.com from a Grateful Dead fan, after users noted the song link and a “Dancing Bear” 404 page, not a decision.
A casual thread on X revived the origin story of XRP with a tone closer to office banter than corporate lore. David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO emeritus and an XRP Ledger co-architect, responded to a question about who coined the term “drop” for XRP’s smallest unit and then wandered into an unexpected explanation for how Ripple got its domain name. The moment reframed the “XRP origins” debate as messy, human, and occasionally accidental. Instead of presenting a single authoritative timeline, Schwartz made room for uncertainty, saying he could not be definitive on every detail. Still, the thread landed because it supplied concrete anecdotes, not slogans, and it did so in real time, where community memory is audited. For longtime holders, the subtext was clear: the days were improvisational by necessity.
The only connection that I know of is that we got https://t.co/TrIRwHx1ub from a Dead fan who registered the domain because of the song.
— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) January 28, 2026
The thread that rewrote XRP lore
On the “drop” question, Schwartz said his best guess is that Arthur Britto first used the term, while admitting he could not say for sure. Schwartz’s answer treated early terminology as builder shorthand, not a formal naming committee decision. The discussion also produced a rare comparison between the two architects. Schwartz said he operates at a high level of conventional intelligence and processes quickly, yet Britto’s intellect functions on a different plane, with traits most people lack. He added that Britto used to ask him to slow down during explanations, even when Schwartz was unpacking Britto’s own ideas, a detail that amplified the mythology while staying oddly practical. That candid framing also set expectations: filtering exists, but certainty does not here.
Then the conversation swerved into Grateful Dead trivia. Another user pointed out the overlap between the name Ripple and a Grateful Dead song, plus the fact that Ripple’s old 404 page once featured the band’s “Dancing Bear.” Schwartz’s punchline was that Ripple’s online identity was effectively inherited from a fan, not invented in a boardroom.
He said the company obtained ripple.com from a Grateful Dead fan who registered the domain years earlier because of the song, not because of any direct company decision. By the end, Schwartz had demystified three long-running community questions: where “drop” likely came from, how differently the co-architects think, and the musical roots behind Ripple’s domain. In a market hungry for narratives, small details can become durable cultural assets.
