On July 20, 2026, David Schwartz posted under his longtime handle @JoelKatz and admitted what a lot of people already suspected: yes, he regrets selling XRP at $0.10. Yes, he regrets selling 40,000 ETH at around $1.05 each. But no, he's not going to pretend those decisions were mistakes in the way most people mean that word.

"Obviously, I wish I hadn't done those things," he wrote. "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."

The post came after another user surfaced his history of early exits. Schwartz, Ripple's CTO Emeritus and one of the co-creators of the XRP Ledger, didn't deflect. He explained the logic instead, and the logic goes back to around 2012, when he and his wife worked out a derisking plan. She agreed to let him hold crypto on one condition: they would trim their position at every new all-time high. Reduce exposure as prices climb. Don't bet the household on assets with no proven floor.

The math that makes it hurt

At $1.05 per token, 40,000 ETH came out to roughly $42,000. With ETH trading near $1,927 at the time of Schwartz's post, those same tokens would have been worth about $77 million. He acknowledged the probabilistic framing himself in a May 2026 post: "If I had thought there was a 1% chance of it hitting $2,368, I would not have sold it for $1.05." He didn't see that 1%. Almost nobody did.

The XRP story runs on the same logic. Schwartz began selling when the token first crossed $0.10, a price he described in January 2026 as feeling extreme at the time. He said he never genuinely believed XRP would reach even $0.25. His holdings had peaked at roughly 26 million tokens before he reduced that position over the years. XRP was trading around $1.13 when he made his July admission, which puts the scale of the missed upside in plain sight without needing a calculator.

The Bitcoin exits followed the same pattern. Schwartz has previously acknowledged selling most of his early BTC position under similar logic, though he hasn't published a full accounting of those trades either.

What makes this story unusual isn't the regret. Plenty of early crypto holders sold too soon and spent years thinking about it. What's unusual is who's doing the regretting. Schwartz helped build XRP from the ground up. He understood the technical architecture better than almost anyone alive. And he still sold, systematically, because the agreement with his wife mattered more to him than the upside scenario. Risk aversion at that level isn't irrational. It's just expensive in hindsight, and he knows it.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset.