In XRP information as we speak, David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO Emeritus and co-creator of the XRP Ledger, publicly admitted on July 20, 2026 that he regrets promoting XRP at $0.10 and 40,000 ETH at roughly $1.05 every – however he was clear that neither sale mirrored a lack of conviction in crypto. Each had been merchandise of a rules-based risk-management pact he had made along with his spouse years earlier.
The admission landed on X underneath his longtime deal with @JoelKatz, after one other consumer raised his historical past of promoting XRP at $0.10 and Ethereum close to $1.
Clearly, I want I hadn’t achieved these issues. However I agreed with my spouse to promote at each new ATH and I actually, actually hate danger. I want I used to be extra snug with danger, however I am simply not that particular person.
— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) July 20, 2026
With XRP worth buying and selling round $1.13 and ETH worth close to $1,927 on the time of the article’s publication, based on a number of worth feeds, the dimensions of the missed upside is just not laborious to calculate.
The central stress this story unpacks: even one in every of crypto’s most technically refined insiders – a person who helped construct XRP from the bottom up – systematically bought belongings that later generated life-changing returns, and he did it on goal.
XRP Information: The ATH-Promoting Pact That Drove the Early Exits
Schwartz’s clarification facilities on an settlement he reached along with his spouse round 2012, once they mentioned a cryptocurrency derisking plan.
She agreed to the plan on one situation: that they’d promote a portion of their holdings at each new all-time excessive (ATH), steadily lowering family publicity to belongings whose future costs had been deeply unsure.
In his July 20 publish, Schwartz described the framework plainly. He added that he had agreed along with his spouse to cut back publicity at any time when his holdings reached new highs as a result of he strongly disliked monetary danger.
The Ethereum sale illustrates the logic clearly. Schwartz bought 40,000 ETH at roughly $1.05 per ETH, for a complete of roughly $42,000.
In a Could 4, 2026, publish, he defined the probabilistic considering behind the exit. “If I had thought there was a 1% likelihood of it hitting $2,368, I might not have bought it for $1.05,” he wrote.
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XRP, Bitcoin, and a Sample of Structured Derisking
Schwartz started promoting XRP when the token first hit $0.10. Based on his January 2026 feedback, that worth appeared excessive on the time; he mentioned he by no means believed XRP would attain even $0.25.
His XRP holdings peaked at roughly 26 million tokens earlier than he considerably diminished that place over subsequent years, based on Ripple executives’ XRP gross sales information since 2012. He has not supplied an entire public breakdown of his present holdings.
The sample prolonged to Bitcoin as nicely. Schwartz has beforehand acknowledged promoting a lot of his early Bitcoin holdings as a part of a broader effort to handle volatility quite than making a particular judgment about whether or not the underlying networks would fail.
For readers monitoring XRP’s long-term worth trajectory, Schwartz’s early exits function a pointy reminder of how troublesome it was to assign credible likelihood to multi-hundred-percent positive aspects in the course of the asset class’s early life.
(SOURCE: TradingView)
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The place Schwartz Stands Now
In different XRP information, Schwartz stepped away from day-to-day CTO duties at Ripple on the finish of 2025 and have become CTO Emeritus. He has mentioned his main publicity to the digital asset trade now runs by way of Ripple fairness quite than direct token holdings, a construction that retains him financially tied to crypto’s success with out the volatility of holding tokens immediately.
He has remained lively within the XRPL group. In June 2026, he backed the XRP Ledger 3.2.0 improve by updating his unbiased hub server, a launch that touched infrastructure linked to DeFi, lending, and tokenized belongings.
His newest feedback concentrate on the non-public strategy to danger that led to earlier gross sales. Schwartz has framed his selections as rational, given the likelihood estimates accessible on the time, and his remorse issues the returns he left on the desk quite than the general logic he used to make the commerce.
Schwartz has explicitly declined to current his strategy as recommendation for different buyers. It was a private desire constructed round a family danger tolerance, one which, by his personal admission, value him a substantial amount of upside.
Whether or not that makes it a cautionary story or just an trustworthy accounting of how laborious it’s to carry unstable belongings by way of uncertainty is a judgment each investor has to make for themselves.
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