Jed McCaleb, a co-founder of Ripple, has sold a billion of his XRP holdings between 2014 and 2019.
Revealed by Whale Alert on a Medium post, he has reportedly made $135 million by liquidating his digital assets.
The Blockchain analyzer also estimated that McCaleb still holds another 4.7 billion XRP, which equals around 5 percent of the total token supply.
Per Coinmarketcap.com, each unit of XRP is currently trading at $0.28, meaning the fiat value of McCaleb’s current XRP holding exceeds a billion dollars.
Too much power to one person
McCaleb was allocated 9.5 billion XRP from a total of 100 million pre-mined tokens. In 2014, the price of the token plummeted 40 percent after his announcement of liquidating his holdings. This forced the company to enter into a seven-year agreement with him, limiting his monthly and annual sales.
According to the agreement, he can sell one billion XRP in the sixth year of the agreement and two billion XRP in the seventh. Whale Alert pointed out that he is currently in the seventh year of his agreement.
Last month, he liquidated 19 million XRP, and the analyzer believes that the rate may increase with time.
“At the current rate it would take him around 20 years to sell all of it, however, his activities have been limited by the settlement agreement with Ripple , which is likely to expire sometime in 2020,” the Medium post noted.
The allocation of XRP to McCaleb also raised controversies in the community as it centralized the token distribution.
“By analyzing over 90,000 transactions we were able to track around 8 billion XRP to Ripple, a settlement account and his personal accounts from which he actively sells,” Whale Alert sated.
The Medium post also detailed that the selling of 1.05 billion XRP was exclusively done on BitStamp.
“Whether or not you believe the future is bright for blockchains like Ripple, the economic power and consequences of whales like Jed McCaleb cannot be ignored and he is not the only one; co-founder Arthur Britto also holds billions of XRP in escrow that will expire sometime in the future,” the post read.
