By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 18th, 2024
In a controversial step, the Ripple co-founder sold an average of 1.8 million XRP tokens for each day of April 2020. Since McCaleb is the co-founder of Stellar, a direct competitor to Ripple, it has also created suspicion of his support to Ripple Labs.
For the last entire month of April 2020, Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb has been liquidating his XRP holdings. As per the data from The Crypto Assistance, McCaleb sold an average of 1.8 million tokens every day totaling 54,215,405 XRP. This is nearly $12 million worth XRP sold in April.
The publication reported this based on the data available from McCaleb’s known crypto addresses. The same wallet currently holds around 76 million XRP tokens. It is reported:
“We noticed that all outgoing transactions had the same destination wallet. Specifically, a Bitstamp exchange address. When analyzing the exchange wallet we saw that the XRP was being traded to USD. The wallet currently holds over $8 million in USD”.
Jed McCaleb is one of the popular personalities in the crypto industry. Besides, he is also the co-founder of Stellar cryptocurrency and the creator of now-defunct Mt. Gox Exchange. In 2012, he co-founded OpenClib which later became Ripple. During that time, McCaleb received around 9.5 billion XRP tokens.
However, McCaleb’s constant selling of the XRP tokens has been controversial. McCaleb had to sign a seven-year-agreement with Ripple that limited his monthly or annual sales of XRP. Since Stellar Lumens (XLM) is a direct competitor to Ripple, McCaleb’s relation with XRP investors have always remained controversial.
Ripple in the Midst of Controversies
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse recently criticized the content streaming platform YouTube for allowing to continue some fake XRP giveaway scams on the platform. Calling it as a huge reputational scam to the company, Ripple Labs decided to drag YouTube to the court. About this, Garlinghouse wrote:
“Across the industry, social media companies have failed to police their platforms from being abused by the entirely preventable imposter giveaway scams. Hundreds of people (including some of you) have been hurt, yet big tech continues to drag their feet. These scams accurately impersonate individuals and companies, and are often spread through fake social media profiles”.
XRP investors have been very much dissatisfied by the cryptocurrency’s performance over the last two years. After its major run-up in January 2018, the cryptocurrency has never seen the light of the day again. Besides, investors have criticized such events like selling major stakes by its promoters which ultimately hamper XRP’s reputation.
At press time, XRP is trading at $0.21 with a market cap of $9.5 billion. XRP still continues to enjoy the status of being the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.