Ripple CTO: You Can’t Steal XRP from XRPL

David Schwartz, Ripple’s chief technology officer, has emphasized a crucial security and trust distinction between assets native to a blockchain and assets bridged across different blockchains.

In a recent social media post, he has made it clear that native assets are fully secured by their own network, meaning that no external system can "steal" $XRP because there’s no copy elsewhere that can be compromised.

"You can't steal $XRP from XRPL because there is no place other than XRPL that $XRP can be," Schwartz explained.

If a problem arises with $XRP itself (for instance, a bug or issue), the governance of the $XRP Ledger can fix it.

He cites Bitcoin in 2013 as an example of a network fixing issues with its own native asset.

External risks

However, when one moves an asset like $ETH onto XRPL via a bridge, that $ETH still exists natively on Ethereum.

If the bridge is exploited or $ETH is stolen on Ethereum, Ethereum’s governance won’t intervene since nothing is broken because the asset still exists on Ethereum. In such a case, recovery isn’t guaranteed.

Even if governance is decentralized, there’s always a point where assets could be potentially stolen outside the native network.

Hence, cross-chain interactions introduce a fundamentally different level of risk (even if governance is well-structured).