The shirt behind the question
David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO emeritus, has explained the story behind a T-shirt he wore at the Swell event. The shirt featured a speedometer-like graphic that pointed to 100. That image caught attention in the XRP community, and X user @unknowDLT asked him what the number meant.
Schwartz said the shirt was made to mark the XRP Ledger reaching 100 transactions per second. The design was not meant as a price call. At the time the shirt was commissioned, XRP traded around 30 cents. By the time the order arrived, the price was near $1. That shift changed how people read the number.
Why people thought it meant $100
The timing was easy to misread. A shirt with 100 on it, arriving as XRP moved from about $0.30 to $1, looked like a prediction. Some community members assumed the 100 stood for a $100 XRP price, or at least a major price target. Schwartz said the team simply went with that interpretation after it took hold.
He did not give an exact date for the commission. That leaves some room for guesswork, since XRP has traded near 30 cents at more than one point in its history. The shirt story is a small reminder of how price talk can attach itself to technical milestones.
The throughput timeline
The XRP Ledger’s speed history gives context. Performance testing in February 2015 showed 80 transactions per second. From March to June 2015, tests sustained between 120 and 490 TPS. In October 2015, throughput reached 525 TPS. The next year, it nearly doubled to 1,100 TPS.
By July 2017, the ledger was demonstrated at 1,500 TPS, a level it has held since. The 100 TPS mark therefore sits early in that climb. It was a technical benchmark, not a price chart.
A simple misread that stuck
Schwartz’s explanation is fairly plain. A shirt made for network speed became tied to a price moment. The community saw 100 and thought of dollars. The team did not fight it. That may be why the shirt still gets questions years later.
