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.”
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.
At press time, XRP traded at $3.11.
