XRP and Crypto's Founding Manifestos: Who Holds Your Coins Now?

Crypto’s founding essays argued that people should hold and move money without asking anyone’s permission. Timothy May’s 1988 Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and Eric Hughes’s 1993 Cypherpunk’s Manifesto set out that idea. Today, many holders keep their XRP and Bitcoin with exchanges, funds and custodians, the middlemen those writers wanted to avoid.

A new Bullrunners video, presented by George Lee, traces that path from the manifestos to spot ETFs and bank stablecoins. The video doesn’t cast middlemen as villains. Its point is that the tools for holding your own coins exist and many holders never picked them up. On a public ledger like the XRP Ledger, you also only keep the privacy you choose to keep.

What did crypto’s founding manifestos say?

Crypto’s founding manifestos said individuals should be able to communicate and transact privately, using technology rather than permission from institutions. Two short texts are central.

Timothy May’s Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. May was a retired Intel physicist. By his own account, he handed out the manifesto at a cryptography conference in 1988. On November 22, 1992, he posted it to a new mailing list whose members called themselves cypherpunks. It opens: “A spectre is haunting the modern world, the spectre of crypto anarchy.” Speaking in Prague in 2016, two years before he died, May said the echo of the Communist Manifesto was deliberate, though he was not a communist. He also said he “dashed off” the text as a one-page summary.

May wrote that computer technology was close to letting people interact “in a totally anonymous manner.” He also predicted the pushback. The state would try to slow the technology, he wrote, citing national security, drug dealers, tax evaders and fears of societal disintegration. The video notes that May’s politics were radical and that many viewers would not share them. Its view is that you do not need to agree with him to see what the tools were meant to do.

Eric Hughes’s Cypherpunk’s Manifesto. Dated March 9, 1993, it begins: “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” Hughes separated privacy from secrecy. Privacy, he wrote, is “the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.” His example was buying a magazine with cash, where the shop does not need to know who you are. He argued that an open society needs anonymous transaction systems, and that until then this had mainly meant cash.

His key argument was that people cannot expect governments, corporations or large faceless organizations to grant privacy out of their own goodwill. In his words: “We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any.” That idea is captured in the slogan “cypherpunks write code.” Documentary maker Jim Epstein, quoted in the video, describes the philosophy as treating technology, more than politics, as the driving force of history.

Why did DigiCash matter to Bitcoin?

DigiCash showed the cypherpunks that money depending on one company could be switched off. DigiCash was a company founded by a cryptographer to build private electronic money. In his Prague talk, May said the company sought permission from banking regulators and partnered with Mark Twain Bank in the US Midwest. His lesson was blunt: “Don’t ask permission to do things.”

DigiCash went bankrupt. According to the video, the lesson many drew was that money resting on one company’s or one bank’s blessing can be switched off when that company fails. The video presents this as the gap Bitcoin was designed to fill. The Bitcoin white paper was published under the name Satoshi Nakamoto on October 31, 2008. It opens by describing a purely peer-to-peer electronic cash system that lets payments go directly between two parties “without going through a financial institution.”

How did the middlemen come back?

Middlemen returned through regulated exchanges, spot ETFs and bank-issued stablecoins. The video walks through each.

Route	What you hand over	Who holds the coins
Regulated exchange	Passport, selfie, address (KYC, or “know your customer”)	The exchange, in wallets it controls
Spot ETF	Money through a brokerage	A custodian appointed by the fund
Bank stablecoin	Trust in the issuer	The issuer, which can usually freeze tokens

ETFs. US regulators approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs, and trading began on January 11, 2024. “Spot” means the fund holds real Bitcoin while you hold a share, and the coins sit with someone else. Spot XRP funds followed in November 2025 with the same setup.

The video corrects a common claim: it says institutions do not own most of the coins. Reports cited in the video put US spot Bitcoin ETFs at around 6% of all Bitcoin. In the video’s telling, what is concentrated is custody. On February 20, 2026, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted that Coinbase custodies more than 80% of US Bitcoin and Ether ETF assets. He added that the company takes that responsibility seriously. The video’s point is that a coin built so nobody had to trust a third party now has most US fund money trusting one company with the keys.

Bank stablecoins. A stablecoin is a token that tracks a currency such as the dollar or euro. According to the video, French bank Société Générale launched a euro stablecoin through its crypto arm in April 2023. In July 2025, the US GENIUS Act set rules letting banks issue stablecoins through their own subsidiaries. The video also says a group of European banks, including BBVA, backed a company called Qivalis to issue a euro stablecoin, with a launch planned for the second half of 2026. As the video notes, tokens like these can normally be frozen by their issuer. In its words, that is the design, not a bug.

Is this a betrayal of crypto’s original idea?

The video argues it is not that simple, because middlemen solve real problems. May predicted the state would point to criminals, and criminals did show up. In February 2025, thieves stole roughly $1.5 billion from the exchange Bybit. The FBI said North Korean hackers were responsible and that the stolen funds were being spread across many blockchains. KYC checks at exchanges are one place such money can be spotted when someone tries to cash it out.

Custody helps ordinary holders too. People lose recovery phrases. People get tricked into signing transactions. The host also says that for some people, a regulated fund inside a pension account is a sensible choice. The video’s balanced view is that May advised against asking permission, while much of the industry asked for it anyway and got it. Both of those things can be true at once.

Where does XRP fit in the cypherpunk story?

XRP did not come out of the cypherpunk movement, but the video argues the XRP coin itself can be held without anyone’s permission. The XRP Ledger launched in 2012, built by a small team of developers. A company grew up around it and took the name Ripple. Ripple sells products to banks and payment firms, and in 2023 it bought Swiss custody company Metaco, so it also sells custody technology.

Ripple holds a large amount of XRP, much of it in escrow released on a monthly schedule. According to reports cited in the video, another 1 billion XRP was unlocked on October 1. The video calls that a real concentration worth weighing.

The video stresses that the ledger and the company are separate. According to the ledger’s documentation as described in the video, a rule change needs support from more than 80% of trusted validators for two weeks before it activates. Validators are the independent computers that agree on each new ledger page. The video says Ripple runs some validators but cannot push a change through alone.

Nobody issues the XRP coin, so nobody on the ledger can freeze it unless the whole network changes the rules. Tokens issued on the ledger, such as stablecoins, are different, because their issuers can freeze them. According to the video, David Schwartz, one of the ledger’s original builders, spoke to this on June 21, 2023, while a feature called clawback was being proposed. The video says he pointed out that issuers could already freeze assets they had issued, so clawback did not give them a new power.

The privacy habit: share your address like your home address

The most practical idea in the video is that a public ledger gives you only the privacy you choose to keep. The XRP Ledger, like Bitcoin, is public. Anyone who knows your address can look up its balance and every payment in and out of it, free and within seconds.

Hughes defined privacy as choosing what you reveal and to whom, not hiding everything. Applied to XRP, the video suggests a simple habit:

1. Before posting a screenshot of your balance in a group chat, ask whether you would hand that information to a stranger in the street.
2. Before pasting your wallet address on social media to show off a purchase, ask the same question.
3. Share your address only with people who need it, the way you would share your home address.

None of this involves hiding or breaking rules. It is about choosing deliberately who sees what.

What to watch next

The custody question keeps coming back in new forms. A few things are worth following:

• who custodies the spot XRP funds, and how concentrated that becomes
• whether Qivalis has launched, since the second-half-2026 window the video gave is now under way
• how bank-issued stablecoins handle freezing
• any XRP Ledger amendments that touch issuer powers

The manifestos’ questions still apply to any holding: who holds the keys, and what does a public address reveal to anyone who looks it up.