Ripple’s executive chairman Chris Larsen has accelerated his long-running distribution of personal XRP, moving the equivalent of roughly $200 million since 17 July, according to public ledger data highlighted by on-chain investigator ZachXBT. “Since July 17 an address linked to Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen transferred out 50 M XRP (≈ $175 M) to four addresses. ≈ $140 M ended up at exchanges,” the pseudonymous investigator wrote on X, appending the destination addresses for the largest tranches.
Subsequent movements flagged by analysts at CryptoQuant lifted the 10-day tally to about 57 million XRP, taking dollar outflows past the $200 million mark at Thursday’s average price.
The transfers landed while XRP was retreating from last week’s local peak of $3.66. On Thursday, the token had slipped to an intraday low near $2.95, before stabilising above $3.000. Although correlation is not causation, critics seized on the timing. On-chain analyst JA Maartun told his followers that Larsen “just dumped ≈ $200 M worth of XRP in the past 10 days… You’re the exit liquidity. Think twice.”
Blockchain forensics firm Lookonchain, corroborating ZachXBT’s figures, estimates that wallets attributed to Larsen still control about 2.81 billion XRP. In a reply on X, ZachXBT confirmed that “wallets linked to Chris Larsen only have another 2.81 B+ XRP ($8.4 B) left,” signalling that even after the recent sell-down Larsen remains one of the market’s single largest potential sources of supply.
The Original Ripple “Founders Reward”
Court filings in the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s 2020 enforcement action against Ripple describe the initial allocation with rare precision. When the XRP Ledger was finalised in December 2012, its fixed supply of 100 billion tokens was divided so that 80 billion went to Ripple and 20 billion to the three founders “as compensation.” Nine billion XRP went to Larsen and nine billion to fellow co-founder Jed McCaleb; two billion went to early engineer Arthur Britto.
Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s current chief executive but not a founder, never received a “founders reward.” Instead, Ripple’s board granted him 500 million XRP as part of his elevation to CEO on 13 December 2016 and a further 250 million on 29 May 2019. By the time the SEC filed its complaint, 521 million of those tokens had been delivered, valued then at about $246 million.
A December 2024 Forbes deep-dive put Larsen’s fortune at $9.2 billion, noting that “roughly half is still denominated in XRP.” Jed McCaleb, who finished liquidating his “Tacostand” wallets in 2022, is listed at $2.9 billion in the April 2025 Forbes Billionaires ranking. Arthur Britto’s wealth is notoriously opaque—he eschews publicity—but if he retained his full two-billion-token grant it would be worth about $6.2 billion at current prices. No credible publication has ventured a formal estimate.
In March this year, Fox Business journalist Charles Gasparino estimated that “the net worth of Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO, is around $10 billion, making him one of the richest people in the country.”
At press time, XRP traded at $3.11.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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