The release of the Hinman documents, the recent legal dispute between Ripple Labs and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has caused a stir in the XRP and crypto community. The emails revealed that Bill Hinman, the former head of the Division of Corporation Finance Regulation, classified Ether (ETH) as a non-security ignoring the directive of other high-ranking SEC members.
In the documents, there are other insights regarding the opaque history of Ripple and the distribution of XRP. Founders of Ripple, Arthur Britto, Jed McCaleb, and Chris Larsen were allocated 20 billion XRP tokens out of the initially issued 100 billion by Ripple. It is also believed that Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse received a significant amount of XRP tokens after his installation as CEO.
The SEC revealed that both Ripple executives, Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen, are “significant security holders” who made personal, unregistered XRP sales totaling around $600 million. In the recent documents, Garlinghouse made $164.26 million selling XRP from 2017 to 2020, using foreign exchanges to sell 94.86% and American exchanges for 5.14% of his XRP tokens. The sales included an $42.27 million sale made in 2017 through Bitstamp, which is the biggest sale he ever made. The US exchanges that Garlinghouse used were Bittrex, Coinbase, Kraken, and Poloniex.
As the founder of the company, Chris Larsen, has earned even more money selling XRP, earning $453.69 million between 2017 and 2020. Larsen used foreign exchanges for 87.11% of the sales and American exchanges for 12.89% of the sales. Both Ripple executives earned a total of nearly $618 million from selling XRP, which is more than what was suggested in the SEC’s lawsuit in 2020.
The XRP price was at $0.5022 at the time of writing, having decreased 4.8% within the last 24 hours.
Featured image from VOI, chart from TradingView.com
