Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz retired on January 1, 2026. He revealed that the only condition that would bring him back would be the return of Nik Bougalis, his former colleague whom he considers indispensable to any new collaboration. Bougalis, the eighth employee at Ripple, spent nearly a decade leading the engineering team responsible for the core code of the XRP Ledger. He left Ripple in 2022 before joining the Algorand Foundation as CTO at the end of 2025. Since both experts are now tied to competing blockchain ecosystems, direct collaboration seems unlikely despite signs of professional respect.
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