Jed McCaleb and XRP: How the Founder Sold 9 Billion Coins

For years, many XRP holders knew Jed McCaleb as one thing: the co-founder who sold. He helped create the XRP Ledger, left the company that became Ripple, and then spent about nine years getting rid of roughly 9 billion XRP. The last of it left his wallet in July 2022.

A new Bullrunners video, hosted by George Lee, walks through the full story in McCaleb’s own words and in Ripple’s. It covers Mt. Gox, why he left Ripple, the founding of Stellar, the legal limits on his selling and where the money went. The video argues the story matters beyond one man, because it shows XRP holders how to think about supply in any coin they own.

Who is Jed McCaleb?

Jed McCaleb is a programmer who built Mt. Gox, helped create the XRP Ledger and co-founded Stellar. According to the video, his first well-known project was eDonkey 2000, one of the big file-sharing networks of the early 2000s. In 2006 his company settled with the American music industry for $30 million and agreed to stop distributing the software.

In 2007 he bought a web address for a trading site for Magic: The Gathering cards, the “Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange,” or Mt. Gox. In the summer of 2010 he read about Bitcoin. Speaking on Anthony Pompliano’s podcast, he said there was no good way to buy it, so he built an exchange in about two weeks. At the time, he said, only around 2,000 people were on Bitcointalk, the main Bitcoin forum.

In early 2011 he sold Mt. Gox to Mark Karpelès, a French developer living in Japan. McCaleb said he built it mainly to learn about Bitcoin and never meant to run it long term. Mt. Gox later grew to handle most of the world’s Bitcoin trading, then collapsed in February 2014. Around 850,000 Bitcoin were reported missing, and about 200,000 were later found in an old wallet. By then McCaleb had stopped running the exchange three years earlier, though he is reported to have kept a minority stake.

How did McCaleb help create XRP?

McCaleb came up with the idea behind the XRP Ledger because Bitcoin’s mining bothered him. In his words, mining uses “a ton of resources,” and he wanted a way to solve the double-spend problem, meaning agreement on who owns what, without it. That approach is still the core of how the XRP Ledger works.

He worked on the ledger with David Schwartz and Arthur Britto, and it went live in 2012. The company that became Ripple was set up the same year, with Chris Larsen as chief executive. According to Ripple, McCaleb held roughly 9 billion XRP when the ledger launched. Within about a year, he was gone.

Why did McCaleb leave Ripple?

The two sides remember it differently. McCaleb has said he brought in a CEO, the two “ended up not seeing eye to eye,” and there was “some drama.” In 2017 he said on Twitter, now X, that he had not stopped liking Ripple but disagreed with how the company was run, including its decision to keep most of the XRP rather than distribute it as originally planned.

Ripple’s version, in a July 2022 statement, was that McCaleb’s role at the company had been limited, with no influence over its strategy or operations.

What is Stellar, and how does it relate to Ripple?

Stellar is a payments network McCaleb started in 2014 with Joyce Kim. He has described the problem it targets as financial networks such as ACH, SEPA, SWIFT and mobile money services that don’t talk to each other, so money can’t easily move between them. The host notes this is very close to the problem Ripple says it solves.

According to the video, Stellar started out built on Ripple’s code and switched to its own way of reaching agreement in 2015. It has its own coin, Lumens. Years later it became the network MoneyGram turned to after its partnership with Ripple ended, so the two projects McCaleb helped start ended up chasing some of the same customers.

How did McCaleb sell 9 billion XRP?

He sold over about nine years, under agreements that limited how fast he could go. Bloomberg’s account, quoted in the video, says he first planned to sell almost all at once, and that after a long legal negotiation a trading plan let him sell down over time.

The timeline, as described in the video:

1. May 2014: McCaleb said he would start selling all his remaining XRP in two weeks. CoinDesk reported the price fell sharply.
2. 2014: He signed an agreement with Ripple capping how much he could sell. From August 2014, his sales were meant to run under these agreements.
3. 2015: A dispute over the agreement went to court.
4. 2016: A settlement replaced it. According to Ripple, around 5.3 billion XRP held by McCaleb and his children went into escrow with a set release schedule. His sales were limited to a share of daily trading volume, he had to donate 2 billion XRP to a charitable fund, and he had to sell all his shares in Ripple.
5. July 16 and 17, 2022: The last of his XRP left his wallet. Ripple’s statement dated July 19 was headlined “The stand is finally out of tacos.”

That headline referred to the community’s nickname for his wallet, the “taco stand.” Every coin that left it showed up on the public ledger, and some fans tracked how much was left.

In March 2025, replying to a critic on X, McCaleb wrote that he told the Ripple community he was leaving and no longer believed in the project before he sold. He said the intent was to let people front-run him, rather than sell without telling anyone, and that Stellar gave XRP holders a way to swap into it.

How much did McCaleb make, and where did it go?

Nobody outside knows the exact figure. The estimates in the video come from different sources:

Source	Claim
Bloomberg	XRP sales netted him at least $2 billion
Widely shared estimate, July 2022	Over $3 billion
Forbes, 2026	Total crypto fortune worth about $3.9 billion

In 2021 McCaleb founded Vast, a company trying to build a private space station. He says humans need to get off the planet and that people need a frontier, “otherwise things start to feel very zero-sum.” He has also said he doesn’t need that much money to live and finds building things more interesting than buying yachts. In 2026, Forbes reported he was committing $1 billion of his crypto fortune to building artificial general intelligence, the point at which AI systems can perform tasks as well as humans.

The video also flags a lesson in misinformation. On the same weekend his final XRP left his wallet, a post went viral claiming McCaleb said he wasn’t selling because XRP would make him rich at $589. No source was given, and the public ledger showed the opposite at that moment.

Was it fair to XRP holders?

The video presents both sides. The case against him: he helped create XRP, said he no longer believed in it, and sold billions of coins into the same market ordinary holders were buying in. For years many holders saw his selling as weight on every rally.

The case for him: he says he announced he was leaving before he sold, and even Ripple’s statement says he announced he intended to sell his stake as quickly as possible. His sales then ran under agreements that capped the pace, and every coin moved on a public ledger. The host’s point is that it was knowable: the terms, the pace and the wallet.

Three lessons for XRP holders

The video closes with three takeaways:

1. McCaleb’s selling is finished. Since July 2022, that known source of selling is gone. The host stresses this does not mean the price has to rise. Other early holders still have large balances.
2. It all happened in public. The host contrasts this with Bitcoin, where coins believed to belong to its founder sit untouched and nobody knows who holds the keys.
3. Supply is the real lesson. Before buying any coin, ask who the big early holders are, whether their coins are locked up and how fast they are allowed to sell. With XRP, most of those answers are public. With many other coins, they are not.

A three-question check for big wallet moves

When you hear that a big wallet is moving coins, the video suggests pausing before reacting and asking three questions:

1. Whose wallet is it?
2. Is there a known agreement or schedule behind it?
3. How big is the move next to a normal day of trading?

A few minutes of checking can separate a scary headline from what is actually happening.

What to watch next

McCaleb’s chapter in XRP’s supply story is closed, but the habit it taught still applies. Keep an eye on large early-holder balances and on any escrow or release schedules tied to the coins you hold. Be wary of viral quotes with no source, especially ones that contradict what the public ledger shows. And for any coin outside XRP, check whether you can see big holders’ wallets and lockups at all. If you can’t, that is information too.