Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has shared the origin of a T-shirt that became a small talking point in the XRP community. The shirt carried a speedometer-style graphic that pointed to 100. At the Swell event, it caught attention because some people read the number as a price target rather than a technical milestone.
X user @unknowDLT asked Schwartz to explain what the shirt meant. Schwartz said it was made to mark the XRP Ledger reaching 100 transactions per second. The timing added a twist. When the shirt was commissioned, XRP traded around 30 cents. By the time the shirts arrived, XRP was near $1.
That shift led some community members to think the 100 referred to XRP reaching $1, or 100 cents, instead of network speed. Schwartz said the team went along with the interpretation. He did not give an exact date for the order in the X discussion, so the story still has a little ambiguity. XRP has traded near 30 cents at different points in its history, which makes the timeline harder to pin down from that detail alone.
Why the number 100 caused confusion
The confusion is easy to understand. A T-shirt with a speedometer and a big 100 can look like a price call, especially in a market where round numbers attract attention. Schwartz’s explanation makes the original meaning more practical. It was about throughput, not a forecast.
The XRP Ledger’s performance history gives some context. In February 2015, performance testing showed the network sustaining 80 transactions per second. Between March and June 2015, tests sustained between 120 and 490 transactions per second. In October 2015, throughput rose to 525 transactions per second. The next year, it nearly doubled to 1,100 transactions per second.
The ledger later reached higher throughput
By July 2017, XRP was demonstrated to sustain 1,500 transactions per second. According to the account, that level remains today. So the 100 TPS marker was an early step in a longer performance story. It was meaningful enough to celebrate on a shirt, but it was not the final target.
For Schwartz, the episode seems to sit somewhere between engineering history and community folklore. The shirt started as a nod to a network milestone. It became linked to a price moment because of timing. That mix, perhaps, is why the story still travels among XRP holders. The technical claim and the market memory got folded into one simple number.
The post Ripple CTO Emeritus Ties XRP 100 T-Shirt to 100 TPS Milestone appeared first on TheCryptoUpdates .
