In brief
- Former Ripple CTO Jed McCaleb has sold over 130 million XRP, worth $69.3 million, since last week.
- The price of XRP has been unaffected by this move, having soared by more than 7% since yesterday.
- The remaining balance of McCaleb’s "tacostand" wallet is 480.5 million XRP ($249.8 million).
Jed McCaleb, the co-founder and former CTO of Ripple Labs, has released 140 million XRP from his "tacostand" wallet over the course of the last week. This is roughly $69.3 million at current prices.
According to data by XRPscan, between February 4 and 6, McCaleb sold approximately 38 million tokens in three batches of 12.7 million XRP. This was followed by two more batches in the next two days, consisting of 19 million XRP each.
Three more sales, again worth 19 million XRP each, have happened this week, with the last of them executed earlier today.
While quite large, the last sales made little impact on the price of Ripple’s native token—moreover, XRP is up 7% over the last 24 hours, and up 33% in the last seven days, even outperforming Bitcoin.
Jed McCaleb served as the Ripple CTO until 2013 before co-founding the Stellar Development Foundation in 2014. As one of Ripple’s main contributors, he acquired more than 9 billion XRP as part of the compensation plan for his role.
Last month, McCaleb made his first sale in 2021, dumping 28.6 million XRP ($8.78 million). Currently, his wallet’s balance is standing at 480.5 million XRP (S249.8 million).
In December 2020, the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused Ripple of raising $1.3 billion in unregistered securities sales since 2013. The defendants have denied the allegations.
Last month, Ripple filed a response to the SEC lawsuit, arguing that under the US federal law XRP is neither a security nor an “investment contract.”
The company also asked the court to consider the regulator’s position on other cryptocurrencies, saying that XRP should be considered a virtual currency in the same way that the SEC views both Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Update: We have clarified that the SEC filed its complaint against Ripple and did not name McCaleb in its statement.