Ripple's Ex-CTO David Schwartz Reveals ETH Holdings Fell From 40,000 to 6

Schwartz Lists What He Sold and What He Kept

David Schwartz, Ripple's former chief technology officer and a co-developer of the XRP Ledger, disclosed on November 11 that he has sold nearly all of the Bitcoin and Ethereum he once held, leaving roughly 1 BTC and about 6 ETH. In a post on X, he set out the full arc of each position: Bitcoin peaked near 1,500 BTC before falling to about 1, roughly 0.067% of the maximum, while Ethereum (ETH) dropped from close to 40,000 ETH to 6, about 0.015% of the peak. His XRP holdings are the outlier in the disclosure. About 3 million XRP remain from a maximum near 26 million, roughly 11.5% of what he once controlled. That residual pile is large in absolute terms, even after the cuts. At the extremes, that means one Bitcoin kept for every 1,500 he owned, and six Ether for every 40,000. Schwartz attributed the drawdown to an arrangement with his wife rather than a single exit: the two agreed, he said, to sell whenever prices set new all-time highs, and the disposals were spread gradually across many years. Under that deal, each record high triggered another sale, a rule he followed across multiple market cycles. He rejected the idea that the sales were a response to this month's weakness, noting the reductions had been underway long before the current downturn. Describing himself as risk-averse by temperament, he said the sales should not be read as a negative judgment on XRP. The disclosure nonetheless drew criticism from parts of the investor base within hours. Schwartz helped design the XRP Ledger, a payments-focused network whose smart contract capabilities arrived years after launch, and his allocation decisions carry symbolic weight precisely because of that role.

Schwartz stepped down as Ripple's CTO in 2025 but kept his seat on the company's board, and he is reported to hold a considerable amount of Ripple equity. Those shares are private holdings rather than tokenized stock, so the part of his wealth still tied to the industry leaves no on-chain record at all. The reaction to his disclosure follows a pattern the sector knows well. Buy during a bull run and the market cheers; disclose a sale and the same crowd turns. Companies that buy continuously, such as Strategy and MetaPlanet with their repeated Bitcoin purchases, are welcomed by investors, while a prominent developer who reveals he has sold faces immediate criticism. In a weak phase the critique sharpens: every disclosed sale becomes evidence, and the hunt for a culprit replaces the search for causes. The timing of the reveal, in a market already searching for explanations, made the hostile response predictable. Selling, though, is an ordinary part of investing. Taking profit, rebalancing a portfolio and cutting exposure are routine decisions, and Schwartz had been trimming for years rather than unloading into this month's slump. Treating those earlier sales as the direct cause of today's weak prices is a stretch. Direction is set by broader forces: US monetary policy, global liquidity and how much risk investors are willing to take, and those forces decide whether assets climb together or slide together. In downturns, weakness spreads across the altcoin market at once rather than tracking any single seller, and when capital drains out, large holders reduce exposure for the same reasons everyone else does. The disclosure landed in exactly that fragile stretch, with demand already thin: BlackRock's ETHA drove a $144.8M Ethereum ETF outflow on Nov 11.

The Skew Toward XRP

The composition of what Schwartz kept is the most telling detail. He retained about 11.5% of his peak XRP while cutting Bitcoin and Ethereum to near zero, a skew consistent with his stated risk management. The post did not say whether any of the remaining coins are committed to staking, so verifying the residual stack means knowing how to read the Ethereum blockchain. The scrutiny he now faces mirrors what corporate accumulators deal with across the Ethereum treasury cohort. One disclosure of this kind does not move a market. Direction still depends on liquidity and flows, which our live Ethereum technical analysis follows level by level. As recorded so far, this is a single act: one post, three sets of figures, and no announced plan for further sales.