Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb has sold over 450 million $XRP tokens so far this year, and still has a balance of around 220 million tokens in his “~tacostand” wallet, according to data from XRP Ledger explorer XRPScan.
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 it 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 receives 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. So far this month, McCaleb has sold around 464.8 million XRP tokens, which at the time of writing are worth over $181 million. The cryptocurrency is currently trading below $0.40 after losing nearly 60% of its value in the last 12 months amid a wider cryptocurrency market sell-off.
It’s worth noting McCaleb’s large XRP sales continued even after the cryptocurrency endured a major sell-off over the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) lawsuit against Ripple Labs last year. The SEC has alleged Ripple and two of its executives “raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering.”
On-chain data has shown that whales in the XRP Ledger with between 1 million and 10 million $XRP on their wallets have been quietly accumulating tokens, to the point their holdings rose 2.4% over the past 11 days and now hold 6.12% of the cryptocurrency’s supply.
Ripple, the largest holder of XRP, reiterated its intention to be carbon-neutral by 2030 late last month.
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The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
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