Arthur Britto's smiley
Arthur Britto, co-architect of the XRP Ledger, says hi on X, after nearly 15 years of silence. It’s his first post ever, after joining then-Twitter in August 2011.
It’s Arthur Britto’s first public appearance after co-developing the XRPL in 2011 and launching it in 2012.
Arthur Britto was never active on social media. His current status and whereabout remain undisclosed.
No public photos or interviews exist. He never attended a conference. Arthur Britto is known as a very reclusive introvert who prefers to stay out of the public eye. And he’s rich: In the original allocation, he believed to have received around 1-2 billion XRP. Ever since this work some 14 years ago, he kept quiet.
In 2018, Ripple CTO David Schwartz mentioned Arthur Britto was still “working on XRP” in some capacity, particularly with XRPL Labs and efforts around scalability and supply (e.g., ensuring XRP can handle billions of people).
Britto was also a co-founder of PolySign, working alongside David. While PolySign sold its Standard Custody business to Ripple, the privately held fintech company defaulted on a loan and was put up for foreclosure auction sale. It has not declared bankruptcy and is still operating.
Arthur Britto resurfacing after long silence with a public post on X is like Satoshi Nakamoto signing an original Bitcoin transaction.
What is Arthur telling us?
The smiley he shares is commonly known as the “Shocked Face” or “Blank Face.” In Unicode, it mostly resembles the “Face Without Mouth” U+1F636.
It typically conveys speechlessness, awkward silence. Or being stunned.
Something is up. Exciting times.
Of course Arthur Britto knows what’s coming.
Uploaded files:I can confirm this was not a hack or compromise.
— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) June 23, 2025
