Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb cashed out a whopping $411 million XRP in 2020 alone. This claim was made by a popular crypto analyst on Twitter called Whale Alert. This is a big revelation for XRP and its users, many of whom have faced extraordinary losses in late 2020 because of the SEC lawsuit against it. Now, the digital currency seems to be at fault again because of the attitude of co-founders themselves.
According to the report from Whale Alart, McCaleb sold almost 1.2 billion worth of XRP throughout the year. Because of the massive price fluctuation seen by the cryptocurrency during this year, the overall worth of his sold cryptocurrency is estimated to be around $410 million. This is a huge amount and shows that co-founders have enormous stashes of the cryptocurrency stored in their wallets and they can liquidate huge amounts when they desire.
Here is the tweet from Whale Alert:
We have updated our analysis of one of the most famous #XRP whales out there. You can read up on what is likely one of the most successful traders of 2020 in the article below!https://t.co/Czw3nP8bW9
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) December 29, 2020
McCaleb was controversially rewarded with 9.5 billion XRP when he left Ripple labs back in 2014. Back then, the cryptocurrency wasn’t worth a lot but it is now and he also managed to sell a lot of it when the price was still high enough. After the SEC’s planned lawsuit on the cryptocurrency, the price has taken a nosedive and his sold XRP would be worth less than half the $400 million he got. Despite the unreasonable selling spree, McCaleb has said that his sales didn’t cause any trouble for the cryptocurrency project. He still holds 651 million XRP in his wallet which he can liquidate at will.
It is believed that 55 billion of the total 100 billion XRP tokens are held by co-founders like McCaleb and ppl like Brad Garlinghouse sits on the board of Ripple itself. This is in contrast to many of the top cryptocurrencies where either co-founders don’t have that kind of influence on the working of the cryptocurrency or their amounts are locked in place for the future or they choose not to. This is just like early bird investors and co-founders selling their stocks at will of aspiring companies even when their ship is sinking. It is considered very negative in the business world and is an indication of bad things to come.
So, instead of acting like a cryptocurrency, Ripple is overly centralized, it has no participation from the community and now it has a big SEC lawsuit looming over its head. It will take a lot of effort and PR from the company to get out of this big trouble.
Image source: pixabay.com
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