Ripple's David Schwartz took aim at the idea that blockchain networks should compete on fee revenue, calling transaction charges a form of friction that chains have largely failed to eliminate. His comments came in response to a suggestion that fees on the XRP Ledger be raised a hundredfold.
Schwartz, the company's chief technology officer and one of the original architects of the XRP Ledger, didn't hold back. Higher fees, he argued, don't make a network better — they just make it more expensive to use. The proposal to push XRP Ledger fees up 100x was the spark, but Schwartz's objection was broader: treating fee revenue as a scoreboard misunderstands what a blockchain is for.
The fee-revenue argument, turned inside out
Fee revenue has become a favorite talking point for backers of various networks, a way to claim that a chain has real economic activity. The logic goes that if people are willing to pay more to transact, the network must be delivering more value.
Schwartz flipped that reasoning. If a chain is charging more, the question worth asking is whose interests that serves — the users who need to move value, or the parties collecting the toll. He described transaction charges as friction, a cost layered on top of the actual job of moving assets from one place to another. The goal of a well-designed network, in his framing, is to remove that friction, not to celebrate it.
It's a position that runs against a lot of prevailing crypto commentary, where fee growth is often cited as evidence of adoption. Schwartz's view suggests that line of thinking gets things backwards: a busy chain with low fees might be doing its job better than a quieter one with high fees.
Why anyone would propose a 100x hike
Proposals to raise fees usually come from one of a few places. Sometimes it's a spam-control measure — fees are a blunt but effective way to make junk transactions uneconomical. Sometimes it's about aligning incentives for validators or node operators. And sometimes it's about making the network's economics look more impressive on paper.
Schwartz's response doesn't address spam control directly, but his framing cuts against the third motive. If fees are friction, then raising them is a cost imposed on every legitimate user, not a feature. The question he posed — whose interests do higher fees serve — is the kind of thing that tends to get skipped when fee revenue is treated as a headline number.
The XRP Ledger is known for low transaction costs, a design choice that has been central to its pitch for payments and remittances. A 100x increase would change that calculus, though even a hundredfold rise from a very low base might still leave fees cheap by the standards of other networks. The proposal's backer hasn't said what problem they're trying to solve.
What Schwartz isn't saying
It's important not to overread this. Schwartz isn't arguing that all fees are bad or that networks shouldn't charge anything. He's questioning the use of fee revenue as a performance metric — a way of keeping score that, in his view, rewards the wrong things.
That's a narrower claim than it might sound. Networks still need some mechanism to prevent abuse and compensate the people keeping them running. The disagreement is about whether higher fees represent progress or a step backward.
For XRP holders and developers building on the ledger, the practical takeaway is that the network's low-fee design is being defended at the top. Whether that holds depends on whether the fee-hike proposal gains any traction beyond the initial suggestion. So far, it's a conversation, not a governance vote.
Where the debate goes from here
There's no formal proposal on the table yet, and Schwartz's comments don't preclude one. If the fee-hike idea does move forward, it would likely require validator support and a period of public discussion before any change takes effect.
For now, the exchange is really an argument about what blockchains are for. Schwartz has made his position clear. The next move belongs to whoever thinks a 100x fee increase is a good idea — and they'll need a better answer than "it would raise more revenue."
