A post about activity on the XRP Ledger has drawn a sharp response from Ripple’s former Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz, who questioned whether a high volume of low-value transactions
A post about activity on the XRP Ledger has drawn a sharp response from Ripple’s former Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz, who questioned whether a high volume of low-value transactions should be viewed as evidence of a weak blockchain.
The exchange followed an X post from @ScamDetective5, who cited data about XRP Ledger activity in August 2026. The post claimed that 793 accounts were responsible for 93% of transactions on the network during the month and described those accounts as bots and spammers.
ScamDetective also claimed that less than 1% of XRPL activity represented real human payments and said the situation had remained unchanged for eight years. The post concluded by calling the XRP Ledger a “Ghost chain.”
The accompanying Bitquery data provides additional figures on the network. It says the XRP Ledger has processed 5.06 billion transactions since 2013. For August 2026, it reports that 793 accounts generated 93.2% of the network’s traffic.
The data also estimates that only 0.80% of the traffic represented human-scale payments. It further says nearly half of active accounts sent a single transaction before stopping, while the median account held 12 XRP.
This is such a weird thing to say. Yes, it's very cheap. Yes, you can use it for useful things and useless things. If it were more expensive and fewer people did low-value things on it, would that somehow make it better?
— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) September 10, 2026
David Schwartz challenged the conclusion drawn from the transaction figures.
“This is such a weird thing to say,” Schwartz wrote in response to the post. “Yes, it’s very cheap. Yes, you can use it for useful things and useless things. If it were more expensive and fewer people did low-value things on it, would that somehow make it better?”
His response focused on transaction costs and the range of activities that can take place on the XRP Ledger.
Schwartz acknowledged that the network is inexpensive to use. He also noted that users can employ it for both useful and less useful purposes. His question centered on whether reducing low-value activity by making transactions more expensive would actually improve the network.
The response therefore challenges the idea that a large amount of low-value or automated activity automatically makes the underlying blockchain less valuable.
The Bitquery figures also include transaction fees data. The report says every fee charged by the XRP Ledger since its launch amounts to approximately $7.6 million and that nobody receives those fees.
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The exchange between ScamDetective and Schwartz is based on the evaluation of network activity. ScamDetective focuses on the proportion of transactions attributed to a small number of accounts and the limited share identified as human-scale payments. Schwartz instead questions whether low-cost transactions, regardless of their individual value, should be treated as a negative measure of the XRP Ledger’s usefulness.
His response leaves the central question on the criteria used to assess blockchain activity: whether transaction volume should be judged primarily by the number of human payments involved or by a network’s ability to support different types of transactions at low cost.
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The post David Schwartz Replies Critic Who Called XRP a Ghost Chain appeared first on Times Tabloid.
