McCaleb is claimed to have begun working on Ripple in 2011 and was a member of the company's founding team when it launched in 2013. He left it in 2014 to work on Stellar (XLM), although he was rewarded with 8 billion XRP tokens for his role in designing and launching OpenCoin, which was then rebranded to Ripple.
The entrepreneur receives the monies on a regular basis and has stated on XRP Talk, a forum for XRP investors and supporters, that he intends to sell the funds he receives after donating a portion of them to charities such as Give Directly, Literacy Bridge, and others.
He has been selling XRP on a regular basis since then. McCaleb has sold 464.8 million XRP tokens so far this month, worth roughly $181 million at the time of writing. The cryptocurrency is currently trading at less than $0.40, having lost about 60% of its value in the last year as part of a wider cryptocurrency market sell-off.
It's worth noting that McCaleb's big XRP sales continued even after the cryptocurrency suffered a major sell-off last year as a result of the SEC's lawsuit against Ripple Labs. Ripple and two of its executives are accused of "raising over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities sale," according to the SEC.
According to on-chain data, whales in the XRP Ledger with between 1 million and 10 million $XRP in their wallets have been discreetly acquiring tokens, to the point that their holdings have risen 2.4 percent in the last 11 days and now account for 6.12 percent of the cryptocurrency's supply.
Late last month, Ripple, the largest holder of XRP, reiterated its commitment to becoming carbon-neutral by 2030.