Talk about a costly investment decision. The chief technology officer at distributed ledger startup Ripple, David Schwartz, has revealed that he lost more than $300,000 trading a couple of altcoins that proved to be worthless.
Schwartz made the revelation on Quora while responding to a question that asked whether anyone has lost money trading bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. He noted that although he has made more money than he has lost, he had purchased several cryptocurrencies that turned out to be disasters.
The CTO listed specifically 11 cryptocurrencies that he “ultimately had to write off as worthless”, including DICE, Flash (FLASH), Vezt (VEZT), Amp (AMP), Signal Token (SIG), Pryze (PRYZ), KudosCoin (KUDOS), Bee (BEE), Neuron (NRN), Blocktix (TIX), and Kind Ads Token (KIND). Most of these altcoins crashed to zero two to three years ago.
“My total losses, just on tokens that become completely worthless, is just over $300,000.”
David Schwartz, who is one of the original architects of the XRP Ledger, has not been shy about his past terrible investment choices. Just last month, Schwartz revealed that he sold 40,000 ETH at $1 each as part of a de-risking plan that he and his wife decided on back in 2012. With ETH currently hovering at $458, this stash would be worth approximately $18,320,000 today — this is basically millions of missed profits.
Ripple’s CTO was also kicking himself for selling a huge sum of bitcoin (BTC) for $750 each and a significant amount of XRP for $0.10.
Although Schwartz evidently has a history of less-than-stellar investment decisions, his work as Ripple’s CTO is exceptional. This February, he announced that Ripple was planning to introduce the Deletable Accounts feature that would allow XRPL users to delete their accounts and recover most of the reserve. This feature went live on May 8, 2020.
Most recently, Schwartz stated that an imminent XRP Ledger upgrade will be a “huge game-changer”.
