Ripple's David Schwartz Slashes XRP Holdings From 26M to 3M

A Sell-Down Years in the Making

David Schwartz, Ripple’s chief technology officer emeritus and a co-creator of the XRP Ledger, has disclosed that his XRP holdings fell from a peak of roughly 26 million tokens to about 3 million. In replies posted on X on Tuesday, he put exact figures on a sell-down that spread across social media after a viral post mislabeled him as Ripple’s founder and presented the number as a shock. “It’s not a secret,” he wrote in the disclosure, before listing the rest of his positions: the Bitcoin stack dropped from about 1,500 BTC to a single coin, and the Ethereum balance from roughly 40,000 ETH to 6. Schwartz stepped back as Ripple’s CTO in 2025, keeps a seat on the company’s board and helped build the ledger long before the ICO boom, so the sales accumulated gradually rather than arriving as one exit. A long-standing pact with his wife to sell part of the position at every new all-time high set the pace. Several users read the numbers as a vote against the token. Schwartz rejected that reading and called his dislike of risk a personality quirk that reaches beyond crypto, adding that nearly every bet he took paid off while the same caution capped the upside. He also said XRP generated more wealth for him than any other crypto asset, and framed the remaining balance as a smaller bet rather than a full exit. What he kept carries weight for holders: Schwartz still owns quite a bit of Ripple stock, an equity stake that leaves him with more risk than he ideally wants, even after Ripple priced a $750 million share buyback at roughly a $50 billion valuation earlier this year. The disclosure reaches a weak market: the XRP price has fallen sharply over the past six months.

@JoelKatz · X post

The disclosure.

View on X

A Written Plan and $1.7M in Taxes

The mechanics behind the sales look more like estate planning than a panic exit. Schwartz has said he sold about 2.5 million XRP in 2025 alone, most of it in tokens he received in 2020 and 2023, and that he paid around $1.7 million in capital gains taxes on his crypto sales. Before any XRP sale, he keeps a written sales plan on file with a lawyer for at least 30 days, a structure that takes timing decisions away from the moment of execution. He first described the all-time-high pact with his wife in July and has repeatedly cited an extremely low risk tolerance to justify the sales. In a follow-up reply, he wrote that this caution is the reason he is not a billionaire, adding that he was never really trying to be one. The full reduction comes to roughly 23 million XRP, an 88% cut from the peak. He has not bought XRP in a long time and has sold nearly all of his digital assets, while the Ripple stock he still holds leaves him exposed to more financial risk than he would prefer. It remains unclear when he made the bulk of the sales or how much they raised. The figures landed in a frustrated community. At the start of this month, an XRP holder asked him publicly whether he was somehow to blame for the token’s downturn, and he answered that his impact was probably very small. He has also told holders that Ripple has no secret plan for XRP, a message with limited force in a market where holders have no formal lever: XRP is not a governance token, so there is no vote to compel disclosure or redirect the company.

@JoelKatz · X post

A follow-up reply.

View on X

COINOTAG’s reading is that this is a transparency event, not a distribution event. The sales spread across years and multiple all-time highs, so they never reached trading volume as a single print and signal no fresh selling pressure. They do confirm a deliberate, years-long de-risking by the ledger’s most-watched insider. The timing lands on a fragile tape, one our XRP coverage has tracked through a test of $1.05 support after a hot October CPI print, continued outflows from XRP ETFs and a live reading that shows XRP down 3.2% over the past 24 hours. Schwartz has not detailed where the remaining 3 million tokens sit, so on-chain readings of his wallets stay unavailable. The written plan rules out a sudden exit; it leaves open whether the last tranche follows the same rule at the next high.