A spontaneous moment on social media has uncovered a hidden fragment of Ripple’s early engineering process. Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, shared a commit tree from XRP’s foundational days that highlights the protocol’s raw, unfiltered development.
According to Schwartz, the image—shared in response to a light-hearted comment about his outdated Twitter banner—showed a web of tangled code commits that captured the chaotic pace of Ripple’s early work. Among the images he offered as possible replacements, one stood out: a multi-coloured commit diagram that drew instant attention for its complexity and visual disorder.
The chart indicated that Schwartz and other Ripple co-founder Arthur Britto cooperated closely. The two used to push the code at high speed and occasionally used the repository as a chat line. Frequent places of commit logs entered during the period are by usernames such as JoelKatz, Britto, and MJK.
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During this period, the two were not so sure about polishing the code but rather preferred speed and coordination, hence the frequent updating of overlapping parts despite the unstable nature of the builds at that point.
Also, according to Schwartz, the given stretch depicted in the picture was strangely messy. This, he said, was caused by the fact that he and Britto were coding (at the same time) on closely interconnected code chunks.
It was frequently necessary to forego the established coding procedures to stay on course with the rapidly changing requirements of the XRP Ledger and the urgency of their aims.
Commit Diagram Reflects Ripple’s Fast-Paced Early Engineering Culture
Besides revealing the behind-the-scenes hustle, the image also served as a time capsule. It captured a stage when XRP was still in formation, driven more by urgency and conviction than structured planning.
The branching patterns and dense commit structure visualized a team operating at full throttle. Code was changed in real time, and layers of experimentation were pushed straight into a live repository.
In the early days, Ripple’s engineering culture focused on rapidity and flexibility. Code was often copied and pasted, submitted without compilation checks, and modified very rapidly as a project was updated. Such an approach was not so polished, but it was considered necessary given the pressures of a new blockchain platform launch.
Schwartz’s decision to post the diagram offers an unusual view into the development of the XRP Ledger’s core. It also reminded the XRP community of the initial difficulties Ripple faced when trying to develop a decentralized, scalable solution to global payments.
The visual description of the commits was a photo of the human aspect of the protocol.
For developers and longtime XRP watchers, the reveal offered a historical record of Ripple’s formative stages. It showed how innovation often arises from the mix of rapid iteration, shared vision, and willingness to take risks.
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