Coil CEO Stefan Thomas has joined the choir of voices reacting to the upcoming exit of Ripple CTO David Schwartz.
Thomas, who held the same role before Schwartz, described the latter as "the heart of XRP."
"You are and always will be the heart of XRP, and I can't wait to see what you get up to with all of that extra free time!" he said while commenting on Schwartz's announcement, which has sent shockwaves across the community.
Thomas became the CTO at Ripple back in 2013 (when the company was, obviously, still in its infancy).
The German software engineer was also a full-time Bitcoin contributor during the cryptocurrency's early days.
After stepping down from his CTO role, Thomas started pursuing new ventures, such as co-founding web monetization startup Coil and working on Dassie, an open-source implementation of the Interledger Protocol that he helped to develop.
In 2021, Thomas attracted widespread media coverage after The New York Times revealed that he had lost access to 7,002 Bitcoins that were worth hundreds of millions of dollars at their peak. The NYT store quickly gained traction in other media outlets.
Schwartz's sudden departure
As reported by U.Today, Schwartz, the architect behind the XRP Ledger, announced that he would leave his role as the Ripple CTO by the end of the year.
The influential executive, who replaced Thomas as the company's CTO in 2018, will get a seat on Ripple's board of directors. Still, the announcement shocked many within the XRP community.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team