Ripple sends 477 million XRP to co-founder Jed McCaleb from escrow

Ripple on the first day of each month routinely releases 1 billion XRP from its escrow according to its distribution model, and most of the funds released are locked in escrow. However, this time around, instead of a billion XRP, the fintech only released $ 900 million and wired an additional 477 million XRP to its CTO and co-founder Jed McCaleb as per their agreement to regulation.

🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 477 700 829 #XRP ($ 115,831,381) transferred from Jed McCaleb settlement to Jed McCaleb wallet

Tx: https://t.co/OiExqCiLPL

– Whale alert (@whale_alert) January 1, 2021

McCaleb left Ripple in 2013 due to some disagreement over how Ripple worked, and as a settlement Ripple promised him a total of XRP 8 billion which would be paid in part to avoid any possibility of massive dumping in the market. McCaleb earned a total of $ 1.2 billion in profits and XRP tokens as part of the settlement agreement.

Ripple ends up withdrawing 1.3 billion in total at the start of 2021 instead of the usual billion. The timing of the payment to its co-founder also raised eyebrows given the circumstances Ripple finds itself in right now.

Ripple currently holds 6,365,030,048 XRP and has distributed 45,425,790,652 XRP while 48,200,000,013 XRP is locked in escrow. The crypto firm claims to use the XRP funds it holds for a range of operational maintenance costs and sell them to investors.

The SEC Lawsuit Against the US XRP Market

On December 21, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple and two of its executives over sales of $ 1.3 billion of unregistered securities in the form of XRP tokens. Since the SEC lawsuit, more than 10 crypto platforms, especially those serving US customers, have announced the removal of XRP from their platforms, including Coinbase and Binance US, resulting in an 80% drop in price. market for the XRP token.

XRP, which has been inactive for over three years, finally saw massive rallies towards the end of November, seeing its price soar to $ 0.90, but it lost all of those gains and more in because of the lawsuit and the massive delisting of the main stock exchanges.