Ripple CTO to launch XRPL node, says it’s personal, not official

Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, is making a personal return to XRP Ledger (XRPL) infrastructure. This time it’s not through Ripple, but on his own terms. Schwartz says he hasn’t run XRPL infra himself in years, but now plans to deploy a powerful, high-uptime XRPL hub in a NYC datacenter. 

This comes in when XRPL went on to hit more than 70 million new transactions (3.83 billion in total) over the last 30 days. It recorded 13.5 million transactions in the last week, which knocked 1.8 million daily transactions. Ripple’s native crypto, XRP, has posted a surge of over 30% in the last 30 days.

Ripple CTO returns to XRPL infra

Schwartz, in a post, mentioned that it will be equipped with an AMD 9950X CPU, 256GB RAM, and high-speed NVMe storage. He added that the server will run on Ubuntu LTE with a 10GB unmetered connection. This aims to act as a reliable public hub with reserved slots for key validators, hubs, and XRPL applications.

“I haven’t run any XRPL infrastructure myself in a few years,” Schwartz wrote, noting this will be a personal project. While the server will operate with production-grade reliability, he stressed it shouldn’t be relied upon as a single point of failure in a decentralized ecosystem.

I haven’t run any XRPL infrastructure myself in a few years. Looking at the network, it seems like the most useful thing would be a high-quality hub with reserved slots for UNL validators, other hubs, and servers serving applications on XRPL. This would be me personally, not…

— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) August 2, 2025

Earlier, Schwartz voiced concerns over the stagnation in XRPL usage, despite Ripple working with over 300 banks. He suggested that the core issue is still regulatory uncertainty. Most institutional activity remains off-chain due to compliance hurdles.

On the other side, CEO Brad Garlinghouse had revealed that Ripple has applied for a national bank charter in the US. It looks to join Circle in a push to plug crypto infrastructure directly into the financial system. A national charter means Ripple could bypass traditional banks for settlement and cut costs.

XRPL DEX, AMM volumes on the rise

Ripple recently bagged a partial win in the legal tussle with the US SEC. It has pushed XRP price to surge by around 29% on the year to date (YTD) timeline, outperforming Bitcoin. XRP is trading at an average price of $2.97 at press time. It went on to hit $3.6 in July.

A report by Dune highlighted that XRPL has now surpassed 7 million total accounts. More than 1 million new users joined in 2025 alone, while over 3k new accounts were created daily on average. It added that daily signups regularly exceed 20K.

3/ Accounts

• XRPL has now surpassed 7M total accounts
• 1M+ new users joined in 2025 alone
• 3K+ new accounts created daily on average
• Daily signups regularly exceed 20K

A 13-year-old chain… still onboarding at startup speed. pic.twitter.com/k38kIqNp0b

— Dune (@Dune) August 1, 2025

XRPL’s native DEX and AMM layers have been growing fast in the past 30 days. Its DEX volume grew from 384 million to 465 million XRP. Its AMM volume rose from 350 million to 408 million XRP. However, daily DEX traders averaged around 2,363.