David Schwartz, Ripple's chief technology officer, sold 40,000 Ethereum tokens at $1.05 each earlier this year, pocketing $42,000. Those same tokens would be worth roughly $94 million today. It's the latest in a long line of early exits from the biggest crypto assets — and Schwartz isn't apologizing.
The early exits
Schwartz also sold the majority of his Bitcoin holdings at $1,000 per coin and cleared the rest at $7,500. He now holds less than 1 BTC. His XRP sales came even earlier: he unloaded most of his stash when the token hit $0.10, having publicly said he didn't believe it would ever exceed $0.25. Despite that history, Schwartz currently holds over 1 million XRP.
Schwartz's defense
Schwartz argues that selling assets isn't morally inferior to buying. Everyone had the same chance to trade XRP, he points out. He also claims that if wealthy investors truly believed XRP had a 1% chance of hitting $10,000, market pressure would've already pushed the price to at least $20. The implication: the market doesn't share that belief, so why should he?
Community pushback
Some XRP community members aren't buying it. They've dug up Schwartz's old prediction that XRP wouldn't break $0.25 — a call that turned out wrong. For them, that track record makes his current price skepticism look like a pattern of underestimation, not insight. The timing isn't great: Schwartz's latest sales come as crypto markets are rallying, and the contrast between what he sold and what he kept is getting harder to ignore.
Ripple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Schwartz's own holdings remain a talking point — and a reminder that even the people building the tech can misread the market.
