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- DOJ launched about 3.5 million Epstein-related pages, together with a July 1, 2014, e-mail mentioning Jed McCaleb and a secret Bitcoin undertaking.
- McCaleb left Ripple in 2013 and co-founded Stellar in 2014, which inserts the 2014 message.
On-line dialogue within the XRP neighborhood intensified after the U.S. Division of Justice launched a brand new batch of Jeffrey Epstein-related paperwork on January 30, 2026. The discharge totals about 3.5 million responsive pages, with redactions meant to guard victims and ongoing issues.
Crypto-focused shops and social media posts circulated screenshots of a 2014 e-mail referencing American programmer Jed McCaleb and a “secret Bitcoin undertaking” linked to his work after Mt. Gox. Some XRP commentators handled the reference as proof that Epstein had an informant monitoring early exercise tied to Ripple and XRP, resulting in renewed questions on why McCaleb’s tasks appeared in Epstein’s correspondence.
The alternate drew added consideration as a result of McCaleb co-founded OpenCoin, later Ripple, in 2012 and was concerned within the early growth round XRP. Nevertheless, the e-mail date proven in shared excerpts is July 1, 2014, which grew to become a focus for these disputing the Ripple interpretation.
Posts from commentators resembling Jungle circulated with the excerpt, prompting threads evaluating McCaleb’s Ripple position, his later Stellar work, and the message’s wording. Others requested the complete doc context earlier than conclusions had been extensively shared.
Timeline Questions Shift Focus From Ripple to Stellar
Some commentators argued that the outline of the key Bitcoin undertaking has extra to do with the early days of Stellar by evaluating the 2014 date with undertaking timelines. McCaleb left Ripple in 2013 and went on to co-found Stellar the next 12 months, which some individuals mentioned higher matched an e-mail framed as new work after his departure from Mt. Gox.
Individually, one other excerpt attributed to Blockstream co-founder Austin Hill added friction to the dialog. Within the circulated e-mail, Hill urged Epstein and Joichi Ito to scale back or halt help for McCaleb-founded initiatives, naming Ripple and Stellar, and arguing that backing them would hurt the broader crypto ecosystem.
The message additionally proposed a name to debate subsequent steps to “deal” with the difficulty, based on screenshots and reposts shared throughout platforms.
Ripple CTO David Schwartz responded on social media to the resurfaced Hill e-mail saying,
I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, however I wouldn’t be in any respect stunned if that is simply the tip of an enormous iceberg. The unhappy half is, we actually are all on this collectively, and this type of angle hurts everybody within the house.
The broader doc launch has additionally confronted scrutiny exterior crypto circles, with reporting noting issues in how sufferer identities had been dealt with and requires corrections.
In the meantime, regardless of the information, Ripple has continued its outreach to the XRP neighborhood by saying XRP Group Day 2026. CNF reported that the occasion is scheduled for February 11 and 12 and can run throughout three stay X Areas protecting ETFs, partnerships, wrapped XRP, and real-world use circumstances.
