Ripple and Stellar were pulled into a new round of social media speculation this weekend after new emails from the release of an Epstein document appeared to appear to reference the two projects in a 2014 investor dispute. David Schwartz, Ripple’s former CTO, responded publicly, saying he knew of no direct ties between Epstein and either network, and portraying the episode as another example of the tribal politics bleeding into cryptocurrencies.
Schwartz reacts after Epstein mentions Ripple and Stellar documents
The spark came from a screenshot circulated on X showing an email chain in which Austin Hill (co-founder of Blockstream) complained to a group of high-profile recipients, including Epstein, about investors allocating capital across competing projects. According to Schwartz, the document “is an email from Austin Hill to Jeffrey Epstein stating that Hill felt that supporting Ripple or Stealer makes someone an enemy/opponent,” adding that Hill likely shared similar views to “many other people.”
As the image spread, some posts described the mere inclusion of Ripple and Stellar in the email as evidence of deeper involvement. Schwartz responded with a letter that attempted to separate the inflammatory framing from what the document actually shows.
“I don’t know of any connections between Jeffrey Epstein and Ripple, XRP or Stellar. [I don’t know of] “There is no evidence that anyone at Ripple or Stellar has met Epstein or anyone closely associated with him. There are some indirect connections between Epstein and people connected to Bitcoin in various ways, but that is probably true of most very wealthy people,” he wrote.
Schwartz’s first post on the topic captured the mood of the day, which was one of skepticism and reluctance to feed it. “I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is just the tip of a giant iceberg,” he wrote while linking to the file hosted by the Department of Justice. He later said the most corrosive issue was the “enemy/adversary” mentality, writing, “We’re all in this together and this type of attitude hurts everyone in the space.”
In the underlying 2014 email described in the source material, Hill was portrayed as objecting to backers funding multiple “horses” at once, and treating backing Ripple or Stellar as hostile to the Bitcoin-focused “ecosystem” he was building at Blockstream. Reports summarizing the series say they were sent to Goichi Ito, Epstein and Reed Hoffman, and included language that investors in both camps were “backing two horses in the same race.”
The resurfaced email also revived an old fault line in how early projects organize themselves. In response to a user who asked about Ripple’s nonprofit status versus Stellar, Schwartz said the idea was discussed early on and that he opposes it.
“We discussed it in the early days. I was strongly against it because it seemed dishonest and illegal to have a non-profit whose success was tied to the gains of private parties,” he wrote. “It felt, at least to me, like Walmart created a nonprofit to help educate people about how much money they can save by shopping at Walmart.”
At press time, XRP was trading at $1.64.
Featured image created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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