Jed McCaleb has been on a selling spree since his departure from Ripple Labs with his 9 billion XRP allocation depleting to about 81 million XRP tokens after 8 years of systematic selloffs. But this continuous act of discharge has raised questions.
Who is Jed McCaleb selling his XRP to?
Jed McCaleb’s constant sales of his XRP tokens have brought up suspicions within the Crypto community as crypto pundit ‘Digital Asset Investor’ asks questions pertaining to the American programmer’s seeming diplomatic immunity.
The pundit posed the question of whom these systematic sales have been accorded to, especially seeing as McCaleb has so far been permitted by financial regulators to sell off most of his XRP holdings without any hurdles despite his affiliation with the legally embattled Ripple Labs and the collapsed Mt. Gox.
“1. Feds don’t touch Jed after MtGox 2. SEC doesn’t include him in the Ripple suit or sue him over Stellar,” the pundit said, “3. They allow him sell his XRP at will for eight years during the SEC vs. Ripple suit. Everyone focuses on Jed when they should be focused on who he’s selling to,” he concluded.
This raised questions within the thread as many crypto enthusiasts ponder on the actual reason why McCaleb seems “untouchable” to financial regulators like the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Others have further asked for investigations to ascertain the actual owner(s) of the addresses he has been selling his XRP tokens to in the past 8 years, as the crypto pundit shares shots of public transactions of his XRP wallet, “tacostand.”
Despite his affiliation with Ripple and Mt. Gox, McCaleb has been litigation free
Jed McCaleb left Ripple Labs in 2014 following issues that were reported to have ensued between him and the company’s executives. His departure did not exempt him from the 20 billion XRP allocation that was shared amongst the three founders of the company.
McCaleb has since then been selling off his own share of the XRP tokens periodically under certain terms reached between him and the company. The terms are meant to discourage McCaleb from selling all his holdings at once so as to avoid a market crash.
McCaleb was the creator of the platform that later metamorphosed to Mt. Gox, a Bitcoin exchange that crashed in 2014 after a meteoritic rise that saw it account for 70% of all Bitcoin transactions then. Mt. Gox suffered a hack that resulted in the loss of 650,000 to 850,000 BTCs per report.
Surprisingly, McCaleb has not had any legal issues whatsoever with either the Federal Reserve or the Securities and Exchange Commission despite his affiliations with Mt. Gox and Ripple Labs, the latter of which has been in a tough legal battle with the SEC since December of 2020.