Ripple & Stellar Surface in Epstein Documents - Ex-CTO David Schwartz Breaks Silence

Two of crypto's biggest payment networks just got dragged into the year's ugliest news cycle.

Freshly unsealed court documents from the Jeffrey Epstein case contain references to Ripple and Stellar—sparking immediate speculation and forcing former Ripple CTO David Schwartz to publicly address the connection. The files don't allege wrongdoing by the protocols themselves, but their mere mention in this context sends a shiver through the industry.

Schwartz's Reaction: Damage Control or Clarification?

Schwartz, a key architect of both the XRP Ledger and Stellar's early codebase, took to social media to frame the mentions. He suggested the references were likely incidental—perhaps related to Epstein's notorious network of wealthy, tech-curious contacts exploring emerging assets. His statement aimed to separate the technology from the individuals named, a tightrope walk familiar to crypto veterans.

Why This Matters for Crypto's Image

For an industry perpetually battling perceptions of a 'wild west' ethos, association with history's most infamous financier is a PR nightmare. It fuels the narrative that crypto is a tool for the shadowy elite—a notion the space has spent billions in compliance and lobbying to dispel. Every scandal, however tangential, sets back the mainstream adoption clock.

The protocols themselves continue to operate unaffected. XRP and XLM prices showed minor volatility on the news—proving once again that in crypto, bad publicity is still publicity, and the market often shrugs before it reads the fine print. The real cost isn't in tokens; it's in credibility, a currency the sector can't seem to mine fast enough. After all, what's a little alleged conspiracy between bankers when you're disrupting the very concept of money?

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.