Ripple's David Schwartz Sold 2.5 Million XRP, Citing a $1.7 Million Tax Bill

Schwartz Posts a $1.7 Million Tax Receipt

About 2.5 million XRP left the hands of David Schwartz in 2025, and the co-creator of the XRP Ledger has now published the dollar figure attached to that exit: $1.7 million paid in capital gains tax. Schwartz, Ripple's CTO Emeritus, dropped the receipt on X to settle a long-running argument over whether he had been quietly dumping the token while the XRP price sagged. Market data puts the coin down about 6.8% over the past 24 hours, a slide that gave the dumping claims fresh energy. One commenter had called XRP “a terrible investment” and said nobody would blame the engineer for heading for the exit. Schwartz's reply ran a single sentence: “The $1.7 million I paid in capital gains tax says otherwise.” The post, which lays out the sale and the tax bill in his own words, also fixes where the tokens came from. Nearly all of the 2.5 million XRP were bonuses for his ledger work in 2020 and 2023, compensation he took in the asset rather than in cash. That detail cuts at the core of the dumping story: the sales trace to payroll-style distributions from years back, not to a fresh raid on a company treasury. Capital gains tax on that scale is a line item individual holders rarely publish, and our guide to Coinbase & the IRS covers how such figures get reported in 2026. The backdrop made the timing matter. The coin logged a 20% monthly loss, its weakest run since February, before the receipt went up.

@JoelKatz · X post

Lays out the sale and the tax bill in his own words.

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The disclosure is one chapter in a personal saga Schwartz has been unpacking piece by piece from 2024 through 2026, and the numbers describe a strategy rather than a panic. At his peak he held around 26 million XRP. By August 2026 the stack had shrunk to about 2 million, a 92% reduction he counted himself: “I think I'm down from about 26 million at my peak to about 2 million now.” Some of the tokens went out as gifts and transfers, but he sold most of them on the open market through a crypto exchange, converting insider compensation into cash in ordinary-sized lots rather than a single block trade. He has not published how the gap between peak and present splits between gifts and market sales, only that the open market took most of it. His selling discipline started early. He took the first profits the moment the price touched $0.10, and he admits he never believed the coin would break $0.25. The same risk aversion made him sell an entire position of 40,000 ETH at $1.05 apiece. “Obviously, I wish I hadn't done those things,” he said of the gains he left behind. He rejects the diamond-hands playbook outright, says he “really, really hates risk,” and does not count himself among long-term holders. He and his wife operated an ironclad rule: every time the price printed a new all-time high, they sold a fixed slice of the holdings. Cashing out, in his framing, is simply the cost of being able to sleep better at night. Volatility barely touches him now, since his net worth sits largely outside the token. Most of his savings moved into Ripple stock, which is illiquid but gives direct exposure to the company's wins and keeps his personal capital insulated from exchange chaos.

The 92% Drawdown Behind the Sale

The primary record here is Schwartz's own post, and it does work no third-party estimate can: it fixes the size, the year and the tax cost of the sales in one document. For holders, the relevant fact is the shape of the flow. A co-creator who sold a fixed slice at every all-time high is a metered source of supply, not a single shock, and the 92% drawdown from 26 million shows how long the trickle ran. Buyers who took the other side of those high-price sales supplied the exit liquidity. The sales also ran through a soft tape, one that included seven days of the coin trailing Bitcoin by 8% amid altcoin selling, conditions under which insider supply meets weaker bids. Where the record ends, about 2 million XRP remain in Schwartz's hands, with the bulk of his wealth now parked in illiquid Ripple stock rather than the token.