Co-founder’s Sell-off Plans Precipitate Ripple Labs Price Plunge

Ripple Labs co-founder Jed McCaleb has revealed that he plans to sell off his entire massive holding in the company, which has prompted the price of Ripple’s native digital currency to drop sharply and steeply.

Ripple’s contribution to the digital currency ecosystem is a a decentralised order book that relies on open-source peer-to-peer payment protocols to ehance the speed of financial transactions. The co-founders also developed the XRP digital currency that is only usable within Ripples system and acts as an spam protection measure and bridge currency.

In a post on the XRP Talk message board, McCaleb wrote “I plan to start selling all of my remaining XRP beginning in two weeks. Because I have immense respect for the community members and want to be transparent, I’m publicly announcing this before I start.”

100 billion XRP were created in total, 80 billion of which were given to Ripple Labs to manage and distribute to users. The co-founders kept were the holders of the remaining 20 billion—McCaleb’s current stash is estimated at about 9 billion, as he has given some away to charity over time.

McCaleb stopped working with Ripple actively last year, he is also the original founder of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, though he had sold it off and ceased any association long before the recent excitement.

News of the planned sell off has seen XRP’s price drop by as much as 65% in 24 hours.

Arthur Britto, another co-founder is unconcerned that sell off will not damage the outfit in the long term. 

“Prior to today, we’ve been working on a founders’ XRP lock up plan, which Chris (Larsen) and I are participating in. You can rest assured that a dumping event like this won’t happen from other co-founders,” Britto said, reports Finextra.

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