David Schwartz Says Selling XRP Doesn’t Make Him The Villain

David Schwartz once sold 40,000 Ethereum tokens for $1.05 each. That trade netted him $42,000. Those same tokens are worth roughly $94 million today.

A Pattern Of Early Exits

It wasn’t a one-time call. Schwartz, the former chief technology officer of Ripple, also held more than 1,000 Bitcoin at one point. He sold the bulk of it at $1,000 per coin, then cleared out most of what remained at $7,500.

He now holds less than one BTC. His XRP story follows a similar arc — he sold most of his holdings when the token hit $0.10, having never believed it would climb to $0.25.

Those disclosures have drawn scrutiny from corners of the XRP community, with some pointing to his early exits as evidence of poor judgment.

The criticism sharpened recently when Schwartz publicly questioned whether XRP could ever reach $100 or $10,000 — price targets that many in the community treat as realistic.

Everyone had the same opportunity to buy and sell XRP that I did. I did the same thing with bitcoin and ETH and nobody seems to have a problem with that. I utterly reject the idea that selling is somehow morally inferior to buying and have advocated that everyone sell when it’s…

— David ‘JoelKatz’ Schwartz (@JoelKatz) May 5, 2026

What Schwartz Actually Said

His response came on X. He pushed back on the idea that selling an asset makes someone less committed or somehow at fault.

According to Schwartz, every investor had the same chance to buy and sell XRP that he did. He also noted that he applied the same approach to Bitcoin and Ethereum, and that neither of those sales drew the same level of backlash.