Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz has named the only reason he would be willing to come out of retirement. The chief architect of the $XRP Ledger (XRPL), who retired on Jan. 1, 2026, wrote directly that his comeback would depend not on money or the scale of the task, but on one specific person — Nik Bougalis.
A bridge to the past: Who is Nik Bougalis?
For the Ripple ecosystem, Bougalis is a cult figure whose history is directly intertwined with the company’s earliest steps. As only the eighth employee on staff, he spent nearly a decade leading the key engineering team that literally assembled the XRPL core code piece by piece.
He is also credited with three fundamental company patents in advanced cryptography, which became part of the technological foundation of today’s distributed network.
The one thing that could almost make me think seriously about unretiring would be getting to work with @nbougalis again.
— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) July 23, 2026
However, this powerful engineering bridge was broken: Bougalis left Ripple in 2022 and, at the end of 2025, took over the technology division as CTO of the Algorand Foundation.
Schwartz himself stepped away from his operational role only recently, choosing a quieter life after 13 years of continuous coding. He now advises the company selectively as CTO Emeritus and assists with releases such as the June XRPL 3.2.0 update.
Because both specialists are firmly tied to different, competing blockchain ecosystems, their reunion in actual code appears more like an attractive hypothesis, while Schwartz’s tweet stands as a rare acknowledgment of professional respect for a former colleague in the crypto industry.
This is not Schwartz’s first ironic remark since retiring. In January, he had already joked that $XRP‘s 20% jump happened “because he retired.” But behind his signature irony about Bougalis this time lies a rare direct admission — this is not merely a joke, but a reference to one of the few people for whom he would be willing to return to coding.
