XRP billionaire boys club: Tracking Ripple’s earliest insiders •

Ripple founders and early insiders have sold billions of dollars worth of personal XRP allocations.

According to Forbes, two of its co-founders, Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb, are worth a combined $14.7 billion based almost entirely on their XRP and Ripple equity holdings.

This year alone, Larsen has transferred hundreds of millions of dollars worth of personal XRP allocations into exchanges.

Unfortunately, the full history of their sales and current XRP ownership is hidden from public view.

This is largely due to Ripple’s developers permanently deleting the XRP Ledger’s first 32,569 blocks. This technical mistake erased the history of which wallets sold XRP in 2012, the blockchain’s first year in operation.

It also obscured untold data from the most important, formative months of the XRP Ledger.

Despite the community reconstructing a decent amount of data since 2013, the full transaction histories of Christopher Larsen, Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, David “Joel Katz” Schwartz, and other early insiders like Brad Garlinghouse might never become public knowledge.

And while some, like McCaleb, have allowed the media to broadcast their personal sales transparently, others, like Britto, have mostly kept their personal finances private.

Nevertheless, Protos has drawn on court documents, self-disclosures on social media, and third-party estimates, in an effort to piece together what’s known about the wealth of these five large recipients of XRP during its earliest years.

Before we begin, here’s a timeline of some of the key events in Ripple’s history:

Timeline of XRP

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Chris Larsen

Larsen, hired by McCaleb in 2012 and serving as Ripple’s CEO through 2016, usually tops the wealth leaderboard of early Ripple insiders.

Estimates of his personal net worth today start at $8 billion and go as high as $11 billion and beyond.

Larsen received 9 billion XRP at the genesis of the blockchain in 2012.

Blockchain analysts believe Larsen transferred or sold about $175 million worth of XRP on July 25, $26 million on July 17, $31 million on January 22, $60 million on January 16, and $24 million on January 6.

Those are just the transfers analysts have been able to track since the start of this year.

In the above paragraph, the ambiguity of “transferred or sold” is intentional.

Because personal XRP allocations are private assets, Ripple insiders are under no obligation to publicly disclose their sales. As a result, unless an insider admits that an actual sale has occurred, the best that analysts can do is track any of their known wallets’ transfers into centralized exchanges.

Once commingled with other customers’ coins inside exchanges’ omnibus wallets, it becomes difficult to determine whether they subsequently sold, converted, or held the asset.

In terms of actual sales, the leading estimate of Larsen’s fiat gains from selling XRP comes from a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement action.

According to commissioners, Larsen and his wife sold at least $450 million worth of XRP from 2015 through 2020.

In 2014 and 2015, Larsen also donated 1.2 billion XRP to RippleWorks, a charitable foundation that reported assets of approximately $1.4 billion as of 2024. In April 2019, he donated up to $25 million worth of XRP to San Francisco State University.

Despite all of his donations and sales, Larsen still owns quite a bit of XRP.

Even his $450 million worth of sales as of 2020 plus a few hundred million more in transfers over the past few years sums nowhere close to his estimated net worth of $8-12 billion.

At least one wallet that’s widely considered to be controlled by Larsen still owns 1,173,000 XRP worth $3.6 billion.

Jed McCaleb

Unlike Larsen, McCaleb has sold his entire initial allocation of XRP.

Specifically, McCaleb programmatically sold at least 5.7 billion XRP over the course of several years, earning him a personal fortune near $3 billion. Forbes estimates that he’s remained near that $3 billion net worth ever since his last sale of XRP in 2022.

McCaleb left Ripple in 2013 and founded Stellar in 2014.

Read more: Ripple went all-in on politics and gained billions

David Schwartz

Schwartz, co-creator of the XRP Ledger, claims that he’s never owned anywhere close to a nine-figure let alone a 10-figure quantity of XRP.

In April 2024, he publicly claimed that his all-time peak holdings of XRP were 26 million, despite a rumor that he owned 1,060,024.99997 XRP.

Schwartz claims that he and his wife agreed to sell some of his XRP as well as the BTC that he had accumulated at $0.10 and $750, respectively.

His current net worth and lifetime XRP sales are hidden from public view.

Read more: Ripple co-founder explains why most banks don’t use XRP

Arthur Britto

As co-creator of the XRP Ledger, BitMEX Research estimated that Britto received 1 billion XRP in 2012, subject to a lock-up agreement.

In fact, Ripple Labs didn’t object to an SEC allegation that Britto received double that amount: 2 billion.

In either case, due to the loss of XRP ledgers prior to January 1, 2013 and Britto maintaining his privacy, it’s nearly impossible to determine how much XRP he’s sold.

While Britto wasn’t a defendant in the SEC’s landmark lawsuit against Ripple Labs, Larsen, and Garlinghouse, he has previously stated that he was subject to a “founders’ XRP lock up plan, which Chris [Larsen] and I are participating in.”

He’s also been mostly silent on social media. He created an X (then Twitter) account in 2011 and has only posted once in many years. He posted a single emoji earlier this year.

Brad Garlinghouse

According to the SEC, Garlinghouse sold $150 million worth of XRP from April 2017 through December 2019. These sales were his largest source of income during this period.

Garglinghouse has been CEO of Ripple Labs since January 1, 2017. Although he’s not a co-founder of Ripple, he received XRP allocations pursuant to his employment.

According to Charles Gasparino, Garlinghouse still owns considerable XRP and his personal net worth hit $10 billion on March 20, 2025 during a price rally in XRP.

This summer, he allegedly sold another $200 million worth of XRP.

A court document related to the SEC v. Ripple lawsuit classified most of Garlinghouse’s XRP sales as “programmatic,” meaning that he was selling on a predetermined schedule.

Like other early insiders, Garlinghouse also owns equity in companies, so XRP isn’t the sole source of his wealth.

A reporter once claimed that Garlinghouse owned 6.9% of Ripple’s equity, for example.

Ripple owns tens of millions of XRP and also has cash and business divisions worth billions in their own right.

Although the company is privately held with no obligation to disclose its cap table, there are equity investors from as early as 2013 like Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures.