Crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb takes rare break in savage XRP dumps

Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb dumped millions of XRP each day for almost the entire year. He hasn't offloaded any at all in September.

Crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb has apparently stopped dumping his Ripple (XRP) on the market — at least for now.

McCaleb (a founder of crypto projects Ripple Labs, Stellar, and the infamous exchange Mt. Gox) has steadily sold millions of dollars worth XRP per day all year.

But it looks like he hasn’t sold a single Ripple in September.

McCaleb’s “tacostand” Ripple wallet — which makes regular transfers to crypto exchange Bitstamp — hasn’t seen an outgoing transaction since August 31.

This is despite receiving his usual monthly XRP payment from Ripple Labs on September 1, this time worth nearly 175 million XRP ($169 million).

McCaleb was on track to run out of XRP this month

Protos previously detailed McCaleb’s tumultuous relationship with Ripple Labs, which came to a head in May 2014 when he threatened to offload his entire XRP stash (12% of the token’s supply) on the market.

Seeking to protect XRP’s value, Ripple Labs blocked McCaleb’s wanton selling with a lawsuit.

A settlement later that year restricted McCaleb to exchanging XRP in rising increments over a seven-year period. As of 2021, McCaleb can vend 2 billion XRP ($1.93 billion) per year.

Curiously, McCaleb had ramped up his sales significantly this year. In June, we calculated he’d sold more XRP in the previous six months (2.4 billion) than the past six years (2.23 billion).

Jed McCaleb’s XRP stash has flatlined, a rare occurrence (source: Jed Balance).

Back then, McCaleb was selling 12.7 million XRP ($12 million) per day across a three-month average. This meant he was on track to run out of XRP by now.

Those sales have since tapered. By August, he’d reduced his three-month daily average to 8 million XRP ($7.7 million).

Forbes currently ranks 46-year-old McCaleb as the 1,580th richest person in the world, with a $2 billion net worth.

Less than 750M XRP to go

Jed Balance — a portal tracking his remaining stash — now reports that average has nearly halved to 4.2 million XRP ($4 million).

This means McCaleb isn’t likely to finish offloading his XRP by the second quarter of 2022 at best. He still has about 710 million XRP ($674 million) left of his founder’s reward of 9 billion tokens.

Curiously, McCaleb has only taken such a long break from liquidating XRP on one occasion over the past two years.

Ripple and Bitcoin have generally tracked each other since May.

That was in the three-and-a-half weeks between December 23, 2020 and January 18, 2021. The price of XRP fell nearly 40% in that time.

As for this extended break: XRP’s price has dropped over 20% in the month-to-date.

So, this has been another well-timed pause in McCaleb’s liquidation efforts.

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Edit 13:15 UTC, Sept 20: Clarified that McCaleb had sold millions of dollars in XRP each day in paragraph 2.