Sometimes all it takes is a random tweet to unlock a piece of crypto history. Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz just revealed a slice of XRP’s origin story that most people in the industry never expected to see: a real commit tree from Ripple’s early development days, complete with the names, messiness and raw engineering hustle that shaped the protocol’s core.
The reveal came after someone made a joke about changing Schwartz’s old Twitter header image, which still had a well-worn quote about Ripple’s early fights with legacy finance.
Instead of just swapping the banner, Schwartz shared four new options, one of which immediately sparked a reaction – a chaotic, spaghetti-like commit diagram that looked more like abstract art than structured code.
When Ripple was still in its early days, Schwartz and Arthur Britto worked so fast, and sometimes so informally, that they used the repo itself like a chatroom, pushing code even when it did not compile, just to keep coordination flowing.
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The commit logs from that time show usernames like JoelKatz, Britto and MJK logging in and out, with loads of quick commits changing everything from transaction logic to how things are serialized.
The code branches themselves – all over the place and multi-coloured – captures that energy well: zero polish, zero pause, only iteration. Schwartz said the stretch shown was particularly messy because he and Britto were both modifying nearby components at the same time, which they usually tried to avoid.