Ripple CTO David Schwartz admitted that choosing a stake in the company instead of paying for XRP tokens was “probably a big mistake”.

According to him, at the time of this writing, the value was around 500,000 coins, worth ~$180,000. The programmer currently owns about 2% of the shares in the fintech firm.

Schwartz commented on a Forbes article about his role in creating Ripple products. Company founders Arthur Britto, Jed McCaleb and Chris Larsen received a total of 20 billion XRP. Current CEO Brad Garlinghouse owns about 6.3% of Ripple and the “nine figure” of the company’s tokens.

“To be clear, it wasn’t really a choice for me. In the early days, it was about getting XRP or a salary, but then I needed money,” the programmer explained.

In the tweet, Schwartz mentioned Ripple’s ongoing lawsuit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission with an uncertain outcome. He also stated that XRP has always been relatively liquid.

On July 17, McCaleb completed the sale of 9 billion tokens, which took eight years after leaving the company. Whale Alert tracked a total of 5.7 billion XRP sales worth approximately $3.1 billion.

He said he “greatly regrets” that in 2020 Schwartz said he got rid of 40,000 ETH at $1, a significant amount of Bitcoin at $750, and XRP at $0.1.

He also admitted that he lost about $300,000 in investments in obscure altcoins.

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