Ripple chief expertise officer David “JoelKatz” Schwartz has resurfaced a years-long thread of hypothesis round Bitcoin’s origins and his personal pre-Ripple work with US authorities businesses, clarifying as soon as once more that he neither possessed “excessive stage” intelligence nor claims particular perception into Satoshi Nakamoto’s id—whereas acknowledging {that a} US intelligence provenance for Bitcoin is “not a horrible concept.”
The renewed consideration follows a recent alternate on X on October 23, 2025, wherein Schwartz responded to questions on prior employment and nondisclosure obligations—context that traces again to an October 24, 2022 thread the place he weighed in on Satoshi debates and litigation threat tied to public claims about id. “There may be nothing defamatory about saying that Craig Wright isn’t Satoshi, simply as there’s nothing defamatory about saying that I’m not Satoshi,” Schwartz wrote in 2022, including, “There may be nothing inherently improper with not being Satoshi.”
In the identical 2022 alternate, after group member @XRPcryptowolf joked “David Schwartz is Satoshi confirmed jk lol” and floated the notion that “Satoshi is basically the CIA or NSA,” the Ripple CTO replied: “That’s not a horrible concept. If the NSA or the CIA occurred to discover how one can make bitcoin, it’d make sense that they’d implement and deploy it to remove the chance that somebody hostile to the US would do it first and doubtlessly made billions of {dollars}.”
Ripple CTO Shuts Down Satoshi Claims
The 2025 follow-ups drilled into Schwartz’s personal previous work and what, if something, it implies. In response to a commenter’s declare—“Nicely, you’ve labored on the NSA, getting excessive stage data, by your personal phrases.” The Ripple CTO flatly rejected the characterization, not directly doubling down that he isn’t (a part of) Satoshi Nakamoto: “I by no means obtained something even remotely resembling excessive stage data. I needed to certify that the factor I used to be engaged on would meet the NSA’s necessities with out even being allowed to see most of them.”
I by no means obtained something even remotely resembling excessive stage data. I needed to certify that the factor I used to be engaged on would meet the NSA’s necessities with out even being allowed to see most of them.
— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) October 23, 2025
He then shared vignettes concerning the compartmentalization he encountered. “One requirement that I used to be allowed to see was that you just had to have the ability to cease it from processing labeled information when you misplaced management over it. I used to be puzzled—when you misplaced management over it, by definition you possibly can’t cease it, proper? It was defined to me that that’s…” He additionally famous signage he wasn’t permitted to have defined: “They wouldn’t even inform me why there’s little indicators all over (usually on entrances or containers) that may be set to ‘OPEN’ or ‘CLOSED’ and what ‘OPEN’ and ‘CLOSED’ imply on these indicators.”
Schwartz additional recounted how, at one level, he acknowledged the consumer interface of “one factor I labored on” not via briefings however “as a result of late one night time I occurred to have the Discovery Channel on and noticed our UI on a display screen.” He clarified the lineage of that code: “To be exact, that was work I did (on the identical core code) for NATO shortly earlier than I tailored it for the NSA. I don’t keep in mind how I came upon what the NSA was utilizing it for. I don’t assume I ought to reveal the precise makes use of, however they’re fairly boring.”
Requested when his nondisclosure settlement would expire, he answered: “I don’t know. They didn’t let me make a copy and I don’t keep in mind—if I ever even knew. I simply hope no one actually cares any extra. Plus, I by no means actually knew something all that secret.”
The through-line between the 2022 and 2025 messages is obvious: a willingness to deal with state-origin hypotheses for Bitcoin as believable with out endorsing them. “There may be nothing inherently improper with not being Satoshi,” the Ripple CTO emphasised in 2022. By 2025, his clarifications across the nature of his NSA and NATO work add coloration however not conspiracy: process-driven engineering inside a tightly siloed surroundings, restricted visibility into finish use, and no privileged window into intelligence secrets and techniques.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.42.
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