In XRP news today, David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO Emeritus and co-creator of the XRP Ledger, publicly admitted on July 20, 2026 that he regrets selling XRP at $0.10 and 40,000 ETH at roughly $1.05 each – but he was clear that neither sale reflected a loss of conviction in crypto. Both were products of a rules-based risk-management pact he had made with his wife years earlier.
The admission landed on X under his longtime handle @JoelKatz, after another user raised his history of selling XRP at $0.10 and Ethereum near $1.
Obviously, I wish I hadn't done those things. But I agreed with my wife to sell at every new ATH and I really, really hate risk. I wish I was more comfortable with risk, but I'm just not that person.
— David 'JoelKatz' Schwartz (@JoelKatz) July 20, 2026
With XRP price trading around $1.13 and ETH price near $1,927 at the time of the article’s publication, according to multiple price feeds, the scale of the missed upside is not hard to calculate.
The central tension this story unpacks: even one of crypto’s most technically sophisticated insiders – a man who helped build XRP from the ground up – systematically sold assets that later generated life-changing returns, and he did it on purpose.
XRP News: The ATH-Selling Pact That Drove the Early Exits
Schwartz’s explanation centers on an agreement he reached with his wife around 2012, when they discussed a cryptocurrency derisking plan.
She agreed to the plan on one condition: that they would sell a portion of their holdings at every new all-time high (ATH), steadily reducing household exposure to assets whose future prices were deeply uncertain.
In his July 20 post, Schwartz described the framework plainly. He added that he had agreed with his wife to reduce exposure whenever his holdings reached new highs because he strongly disliked financial risk.
The Ethereum sale illustrates the logic clearly. Schwartz sold 40,000 ETH at approximately $1.05 per ETH, for a total of roughly $42,000.
In a May 4, 2026, post, he explained the probabilistic thinking behind the exit. “If I had thought there was a 1% chance of it hitting $2,368, I would not have sold it for $1.05,” he wrote.
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XRP, Bitcoin, and a Pattern of Structured Derisking
Schwartz began selling XRP when the token first hit $0.10. According to his January 2026 comments, that price appeared extreme at the time; he said he never believed XRP would reach even $0.25.
His XRP holdings peaked at approximately 26 million tokens before he substantially reduced that position over subsequent years, according to Ripple executives’ XRP sales data since 2012. He has not provided a complete public breakdown of his current holdings.
The pattern extended to Bitcoin as well. Schwartz has previously acknowledged selling much of his early Bitcoin holdings as part of a broader effort to manage volatility rather than making a specific judgment about whether the underlying networks would fail.
For readers tracking XRP’s long-term price trajectory, Schwartz’s early exits serve as a sharp reminder of how difficult it was to assign credible probability to multi-hundred-percent gains during the asset class’s formative years.
(SOURCE: TradingView)
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Where Schwartz Stands Now
In other XRP news, Schwartz stepped away from day-to-day CTO duties at Ripple at the end of 2025 and became CTO Emeritus. He has said his primary exposure to the digital asset industry now runs through Ripple equity rather than direct token holdings, a structure that keeps him financially tied to crypto’s success without the volatility of holding tokens directly.
He has remained active in the XRPL community. In June 2026, he backed the XRP Ledger 3.2.0 upgrade by updating his independent hub server, a release that touched infrastructure connected to DeFi, lending, and tokenized assets.
His latest comments focus on the personal approach to risk that led to earlier sales. Schwartz has framed his decisions as rational, given the probability estimates available at the time, and his regret concerns the returns he left on the table rather than the overall logic he used to make the trade.
Schwartz has explicitly declined to present his approach as advice for other investors. It was a personal preference built around a household risk tolerance, one that, by his own admission, cost him a great deal of upside.
Whether that makes it a cautionary tale or simply an honest accounting of how hard it is to hold volatile assets through uncertainty is a judgment every investor has to make for themselves.
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The post David Schwartz Regrets Selling XRP at $0.10 and 40,000 ETH, But Stands By His Logic appeared first on 99Bitcoins.
