After 8 years dumping billions of XRP, Jed McCaleb’s stack runs out in weeks

Published at: June 30, 2022

Former Ripple Labs founder Jed McCaleb is nearing the end of his eight-year Ripple (XRP) dump marathon, with only 81.53 million XRP, worth $26.55 million at the time of writing, remaining in his wallet’s balance.

According to Jed Balance, a website tracking his XRP holdings, McCaleb’s wallet name “tacostand” has been shedding an average of 4.06 million XRP over the last month but has ramped up daily transfers to 7.34 million XRP, worth $2.39 million, since Sunday.

At the current rate of selling, his wallet may be depleted within the next two to three weeks, to the delight of the crypto community.

On Wednesday, Mason Versluis, a TikTok influencer and YouTuber known as Crypto Mason, shared the news to his 115,000 followers on Twitter, highlighting that 22 million XRP has been released in the past three days.

Jed McCaleb has 81,527,488 $XRP remaining!22,007,874 $XRP has been released in the past 3 days. pic.twitter.com/tqjvOIGj68

— MASON VERSLUIS (@MasonVersluis) June 29, 2022

On Wednesday, a parody account of McCaleb with 4,500 followers who describes themselves as Definitely not the real Jed posted a photo in front of an eatery called “The Taco Stand,” saying, “Almost there.”

Almost there pic.twitter.com/SdstUD4Kzc

— Jed McCaleb (@JedMccaleb12) June 29, 2022

The former Ripple executive has been methodically selling off chunks of his once nine-billion-strong XRP holdings since he left the company in 2014.

McCaleb was part of the founding team of Ripple in 2012 (called OpenCoin then), receiving a share of 20 billion XRP, which was distributed to all three founders, which also include Chris Larsen and Arthur Britto.

McCaleb left in 2014 after a reported fallout with Ripple executives, taking with him his entire XRP share, which equated to around 9% of the total supply. Later that year, he co-founded rival payment protocol Stellar.

Fearing a market crash should McCaleb offload his entire holdings at once, Ripple Labs and the former executive agreed to lock-up terms for his XRP.

The lock-up plan dictated that for the first year, he could not sell more than $10,000 worth of XRP per week. The plan would loosen up over time, raising the amount he could offload to $20,000 worth of XRP per week for the three years following.

From 2018-2019, the restrictions would apply to the number of XRP tokens instead, limiting his maximum allowed offloading to 1 billion XRP per year.

From 2020 and beyond, the amount was further raised to 2 billion XRP per year.

According to Jed Balance, McCaleb offloaded a large portion of his XRP holdings between January to August 2021, a period when XRP prices spiked up to $1.84 in April, offloading 2.74 billion of XRP.

He took several months’ break from selling from September 2021 to the start of January 2022 and has been steadily offloading XRP again since then.

The data shows that McCaleb has shed 627.6 million XRP so far in 2022.

XRP’s price rebounded nearly 30% on June 24, four days after rebounding from $0.28, its lowest level since January 2021. Analysis from Cointelegraph noted that the token’s retracement rally could extend to $0.41 next.