The long-running chatter around Ripple quietly using private versions of XRP just hit a hard stop. David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO and one of the architects of the XRP Ledger stepped in this week to directly address the topic — and with it, ended a thread of speculation that has been circling for years inside the XRP community.

It started with a straightforward question on social media: does XRP get burned on private ledgers? The logic behind the question was simple — if XRP is not being burned outside the public ledger, then deflationary pressure must only come from the main XRPL. 

Schwartz replied with something that cuts straight through the fog: no private ledgers today are using XRP as a fee currency. If someone were to build one in the future, the fees would probably go to the operators of that ledger — not be burned like they are on the public chain.

It is a statement that lands heavier than it reads. For years, some corners of the crypto space have speculated that Ripple might be operating parallel systems — private ledgers, possibly with different prices or XRP mechanics behind closed doors. The idea even floated that Ripple’s work on CBDCs might include a sort of internal XRP variant.

But the latest response from the CTO makes it clear: there is no dual pricing, no private XRP burning in the shadows and nothing that would suggest the token behaves differently on some undisclosed network.

More importantly, even if private instances of XRPL exist for governments or banks, the XRP token itself remains singular. There is no “private XRP.” There is just XRP — burned on the public ledger and valued on open markets.