Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, has revealed some remarkable details about his personal journey through the cryptocurrency space. In separate disclosures made on social media, Schwartz shared two major pieces of information on the extraordinarily low price at which he first bought XRP and the number of Bitcoins he mined more than a decade ago.
Ripple CTO Discloses Shockingly Low Entry Price
David Schwartz, the Chief Technology Officer at Ripple, has surprised the XRP community with a revelation that confirms just how early he was in the game. During a thread on the social media platform X, Schwartz responded to a user’s comment about early investors buying XRP at $0.50 by revealing that he personally bought XRP at a fraction of that price at just $0.006. The disclosure instantly stirred conversation across the XRP community, especially since Schwartz has always been private about his holdings.
Although Schwartz played a foundational role in the development of the XRP Ledger, he did not receive a massive initial token allocation like some other Ripple figures. Instead, he opted for a salary and 2% equity in the company.
Although he did not disclose the amount of XRP he bought at the time or the amount he currently holds, the transparency about his early entry was enough to cause discussions about his long-standing involvement in Ripple’s ecosystem. Interestingly, this wouldn’t be the first time Schwartz shared such details. Back in October 2023, Schwartz shared that his father purchased over a million XRP tokens in 2014 at a price of $0.005. At the time of writing, XRP is trading at $2.27.
250 Bitcoins Mined In 2011
In a separate but equally revealing disclosure on the social media platform X, Schwartz offered a glimpse into his early involvement with Bitcoin. Particularly, the Ripple CTO confirmed that he mined 250 BTC in total. This was back in 2011, shortly after he discovered Bitcoin. At the time, Bitcoin was trading around $30. Back then, mining was still possible with relatively modest hardware, and it was easy to get mining equipment from early crypto forums, but it was a rarity to make purchases using Bitcoin.
Although Schwartz had expressed displeasure at not getting to know about Bitcoin until 2011 in an earlier post, he did get the opportunity to mine when Bitcoin dipped as low as $2.50. Nonetheless, Schwartz’s Bitcoin activity in 2011 places him among the early adopters who believed in the technology well before it went mainstream. He later revealed that he sold the Bitcoin he mined and used the proceeds to acquire XRP and Ethereum. This move was based on his growing belief in more scalable and sustainable blockchain platforms compared to Bitcoin’s energy-intensive proof-of-work model.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $109,040.
Featured image from Getty Images, chart from Tradingview.com
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