Ripple and Stellar were pulled into a fresh round of social-media speculation this weekend after newly surfaced emails from the Epstein document release appeared to reference the two projects in a 2014 investor dispute. Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz pushed back publicly, saying he knows of no direct links between Epstein and either network, and framed the episode as another example of tribal politics bleeding into crypto.
Schwartz Reacts After Epstein Docs Mention Ripple, Stellar
The spark came from a screenshot circulating on X that shows 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 explaining that Hill felt that support for Ripple or Stellar made someone an enemy/opponent,” adding that Hill likely shared similar views “to many other people.”
As the image spread, some posts characterized the mere inclusion of Ripple and Stellar in the email as evidence of deeper involvement. Schwartz responded with a message that tried to separate 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] any evidence anyone at Ripple or Stellar ever met with Epstein or anyone closely connected to him,” he wrote. “There are some indirect ties between Epstein and people connected to Bitcoin in various ways, but that’s probably true of most very wealthy people.”
Schwartz’s first post on the thread captured the mood of the day, both suspicion and a 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 DOJ-hosted file. He later argued the more corrosive issue was the “enemy/opponent” mindset, writing that “we really are all in this together and this kind of attitude hurts everyone in the space.”
In the underlying 2014 email described in the source material, Hill is portrayed as objecting to backers funding multiple “horses” at once, treating support for Ripple or Stellar as hostile to the bitcoin-centric “ecosystem” he was building at Blockstream. Reports summarizing the chain say it was sent to Joichi Ito, Epstein, and Reid Hoffman, and included language that investors in both camps were “backing two horses in the same race.”
The resurfaced email also revived an older fault line in how early projects structured themselves. In response to a user asking about Ripple versus Stellar’s nonprofit posture, Schwartz said the idea was debated early on and that he opposed it.
“We discussed it in the early days. I was strongly against it because it seemed dishonest and borderline illegal to have a non-profit whose success was so tied to the gains of private parties,” he wrote. “It felt, at least to me, like Walmart creating a non-profit to help educate people about how much money they could save by shopping at Walmart.”
At press time, XRP traded at $1.64.
