Ripple CTO David Schwartz Faked Q&A Content With Black Sabbath

Ripple’s chief technology officer, David Schwartz, has admitted that he had fabricated parts of the questions and answers from his interview with the rock band Black Sabbath in what was menat to be an authentic interview with fans.

In his X post on Thursday, Schwartz wrote

"I cheated."

Schwartz explained that his role during the Q&A was to speak with the band over the phone, relay fan's questions, and create a transcripts of their answers.

But just seconds into the interview, Schwartz noticed a serious issue: whilst the Q&A was meant for the whole band, but it seems that the fans showed no interest in anyone else other than Osbourne.

"I specifically asked the moderators to give me questions that weren't for Ozzy. There just weren't any."

In order to not upset the rest of the band members, Schwartz made the decisive move to ask several pre-written questions to the other band members

"I passed a canned questions to each of the other band members in rotation. And I mixed what I could make out of what they said with canned answers from their managers."

In his X post, Schwartz authentically admitted to his mistake saying

"At the time, I felt really bad about the whole thing. It wasn't the authentic interaction with celebrities that I wanted it to be and that I tried to make it."

Schwartz also admitted to sanitizing Osbourne's responses by editing out strong profanity, especially the controversial "C-word".

"I typed up Ozzy's answers as closely as I could, probably getting it way off due to the poor connection quality."

This confession comes just days after the news of Osbourne's death, who sadly passed at the age of 76.

As tributes poured in, memecoins inspired by the rock legend surged in value. One token, The Mad Man (OZZY), jumped more than 16,800% to trade at $0.003851, reaching a $3.85 million market cap.

Ripple Lawsuit With SEC Comes To An End

In a separate development, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced the company would withdraw its cross-appeal against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The SEC is also expected to drop its own appeal. This follows a US district court’s decision not to reduce Ripple’s $125 million civil penalty or reverse its classification of institutional XRP sales as securities transactions.

Amid regulatory updates, XRP’s perpetual futures contracts notional open interest hit a new all-time high of $8.8 billion, equivalent to nearly 2.9 billion XRP in open positions, according to CoinGlass.

This surpassed its previous $8.3 billion record posted in late January—shortly before former U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term.