Jed McCaleb, a co-founder of Ripple Labs, has sold 28.6 million XRP tokens, worth over $8.78 million at press time, after pausing his sales for 25 days. McCaleb, it’s worth noting, sells the funds he was awarded for co-founding the firm.
McCaleb is said to have started working on Ripple back in 2011, and was part of its founding team when the firm launched in 2013. While he left the firm in 2014 to work on Stellar (XLM), he was awarded 8 billion XRP tokens for his role in developing and founding OpenCoin, which was later rebranded to Ripple.
The entrepreneur received the funds on a fixed schedule and has made it clear via XRP Talk, a forum for XRP investors and proponents, that he plans on selling the funds he receives, as he has already donated part of the funds to charities such as Give Directly, Literacy Bridge, and others.
Since then he has been periodically selling XRP. The most recent sale was spotted by researcher Leonidas Hadjiloizou.
His 25-day pause may have been related to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) lawsuit against ripple and its other co-founders, Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen, alleging the firm and its executives “raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering.”
Hadjiloizou noted that Jed has in the past halted his XRP sales to allow a charity he donated the funds to sell. He added there is “no way to know why he resumed” the sale.” Speculating, he said he “could have waited for some advice from his lawyers or for a million other reasons.”
The lawsuit saw the price of XRP plunge over 50% over a plethora of delisting announcements from major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Bitstamp, Coinbase, Binance.US, Bittrex, and others. Asset managers, market makers, wallets, and brokers soon stopped supporting XRP as well.
On top of that, the price had been inflated thanks to Flare network’s Spark (FLR) token airdrop in early December. Data shows that once rumors of the lawsuit started circulating, XRP dropped from about $0.60 to a low of $0.18 before recovering.
At press time, XRP is trading at $0.306.
The price of the cryptocurrency seemingly did not recover over any news related to the SEC lawsuit against Ripple, but instead because of the community rallying behind it. As CryptoGlobe reported, over 39,000 XRP supporters have asked the United States government to recognize XRP as a currency in a petition.
The petition seemingly seeks to counter the SEC’s claim by asking the federal government to intervene and evaluate XRP as a currency. Moreover, while various trading platforms delisted XRP as a preventive move, crypto exchange Uphold affirmed it will keep XRP listed until the lawsuit is resolved.
It further pointed out that the SEC’s goal is to protect consumers, and believes it’s hard to see “how a judgment rendering XRP essentially worthless and inflicting billions of dollars of losses on retail investors” would square with that goal.
Featured image via Pixabay.
