Former Ripple executive Jed McCaleb didn’t suffer too much from the XRP collapse in December. Over the whole of 2020, he collected $ 411 million by selling his tokens.
The Jed McCaleb case is a bit special. If he no longer participates in the development of Ripple and of XRP since 2014, the former CTO has retained a definite influence on the value of the token. His departure was indeed accompanied by the allocation of 9 billion tokens.
And throughout 2020, McCaleb made various divestitures. Whale Alert did the math and says it has been a particularly profitable year for the former Ripple executive. In all, the latter therefore ceded 1.2 billion XRP.
1 billion XRP between 2014 and 2019
At an average price of $ 0.34 per token, he therefore collected the tidy sum of $ 411 million. In all, he would therefore have sold 27% of the capital he holds in an account made available to him by Ripple Labs.
In addition, these record sales for 2020 reflect an acceleration. CoinTelegraph recalls that over the previous five years, from 2014 to 2019, Jed McCaleb ceded nearly one billion XRP. In the space of a year, this time he resold an equivalent number of tokens.
This heritage makes the former Ripple executive one of the richest holders of cryptocurrency. Whale Alert estimates its XRP holdings (existing and previously sold) to be equivalent to $ 1.2 billion. Since the SEC complaint, however, the value of its remaining tokens has deteriorated severely.
But do these massive sales of XRP nevertheless have an influence on the price of the token? In 2014, Jed McCaleb signed an agreement limiting the number of XRP that can be sold each week. The objective was precisely to avoid an impact on prices. This agreement will expire in 2023.
A whale with a major economic power
The attributions of XRP to McCaleb nevertheless continue under this contract. 1is January 2020, he thus received an additional 477.7 million XRP. His wallet still holds 652.1 million.
Whale Alert sees this situation as a curiosity, but also a risk. It is amazing to see a single individual holding such a weight in crypto in a project in which he has not been involved in years.
“Whether or not you believe the future of blockchains like Ripple is promising, the economic power and the consequences of whales like Jed McCaleb cannot be ignored …” analyzes the specialist.