Blockchain payments company Ripple today sent its co-founder and former chief technology officer Jed McCaleb another payment of over 408 million XRP tokens, worth around $420 million at current prices.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 408,123,659 #XRP (420,345,541 USD) transferred from Jed McCaleb Settlement to Jed McCaleb wallethttps://t.co/vF2gp3rH95
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) June 3, 2021
According to blockchain explorer XRPScan, this is the latest in a series of massive XRP transactions that Ripple has been sending McCaleb on a monthly basis since September 2020.
In his turn, McCaleb continues to gradually sell his tokens in smaller portions. In line with his “pattern” of late, Ripple co-founder chooses a certain amount of XRP every week—usually quite substantial by mere mortals’ standards—and proceeds to dump them for seven days in a row.
Over the past week, McCaleb’s “dumps” amounted to 16,353,884 XRP per day—or roughly $16.85 million. Before that, he sold just over 10 million XRP daily for two weeks. At press time, there is still 633,699,648 XRP ($652 million) left in his “Tacostand” wallet.
More fuel for XRP dump machine
As CryptoSlate reported, McCaleb left Ripple in 2014 over internal disagreements after co-founding the company in 2011. After his departure, McCaleb initially tried to dump all his XRP in one fell swoop, but Ripple stopped him from doing that by filing a series of lawsuits, according to the firm’s current CTO David Schwartz.
“Jed tried to dump his XRP quickly and Ripple acted to stop him through a series of lawsuits. Thanks to Ripple’s refusal, Jed’s XRP will probably be worth more than $1 billion. He will probably be the only person to become a self-made billionaire despite his best efforts,” Schwartz wrote in 2018.
Meanwhile, Ripple remains locked in a legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over its sales of XRP. In its lawsuit, the regulator alleged that Ripple and its executives, CEO Brad Garlinghouse and chairman Chris Larsen, “raised over $1.3 billion through unregistered, ongoing digital asset security offering” since 2013.
However, only a small percentage of such cases ever reach trial, according to attorney Jeremy Hogan, so the SEC is likely to settle its Ripple lawsuit before that time.
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