Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, has addressed one of the longest-running myths about XRP, the claim that hundreds of transactions from the early days wiped out part of the cryptocurrency’s supply due to a bug.
According to critics, 534 transactions involving XRP’s original supply, known as the premine of 100 billion coins in 2012, were supposedly lost because of a technical glitch. This led to questions about whether the amount of XRP held by Ripple today can be independently verified.
In an interview with Decrypt, Schwartz explained that Ripple’s accounts are well known and traceable on the blockchain. While ownership details of every historical account are not always public, the source of funds can still be tracked. He said that at the time of the supposed “loss,” Ripple still held about 99.9% of all XRP, meaning the number of coins involved was tiny.
One of Schwartz’s important points was that XRP had no market value in 2012. “It had literally zero value,” he said. “When we would give XRP away, we would just pick a number at random, like 35,000 coins, and hand them out.”
The blockchain’s ledger, a record of all transactions, was reset multiple times in the early development stages when protocol changes were made. This was common practice at the time, and when the ledger “loss” happened, the team had no way of knowing it would become the permanent record moving forward.
Schwartz said that while the historical record of some early transactions was lost, the XRP itself was not destroyed or removed from circulation. Each ledger still contains the current balances of all accounts, and the origins of those balances can be traced to Ripple’s founders if they came from the premine.
The only thing missing is the full transaction history from the earliest days and something that could have been erased entirely if another ledger reset had been performed later on.
For Schwartz, the key takeaway is that these early ledger resets were part of the normal development process, and the small number of coins in question had no value at the time. The myth of “missing XRP” is more of a misunderstanding about blockchain history than evidence of foul play.
Ripple’s current holdings remain transparent, and anyone can verify them using public blockchain data. As Schwartz put it, “All the balances are visible, and it’s known whether they were funded from the founders of Ripple.”
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