XRP Community Reacts After Epstein Files Hint at Early Ripple Monitoring

• DOJ released about 3.5 million Epstein-related pages, including a July 1, 2014, email mentioning Jed McCaleb and a secret Bitcoin project.
• McCaleb left Ripple in 2013 and co-founded Stellar in 2014, which fits the 2014 message.

Online discussion in the XRP community intensified after the U.S. Department of Justice released a new batch of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents on January 30, 2026. The release totals about 3.5 million responsive pages, with redactions intended to protect victims and ongoing matters. Crypto-focused outlets and social media posts circulated screenshots of a 2014 email referencing American programmer Jed McCaleb and a “secret Bitcoin project” linked to his work after Mt. Gox. Some XRP commentators treated the reference as evidence that Epstein had an informant tracking early activity tied to Ripple and XRP, leading to renewed questions about why McCaleb’s projects appeared in Epstein’s correspondence. The exchange drew added attention because McCaleb co-founded OpenCoin, later Ripple, in 2012 and was involved in the early development around XRP. However, the email date shown in shared excerpts is July 1, 2014, which became a focal point for those disputing the Ripple interpretation. Posts from commentators such as Jungle circulated with the excerpt, prompting threads comparing McCaleb’s Ripple role, his later Stellar work, and the message’s wording. Others requested the full document context before conclusions were widely shared. Timeline Questions Shift Focus From Ripple to Stellar Some commentators argued that the description of the secret Bitcoin project has more to do with the early days of Stellar by comparing the 2014 date with project timelines. McCaleb left Ripple in 2013 and went on to co-found Stellar the following year, which some participants said better matched an email framed as new work after his departure from Mt. Gox. Separately, another excerpt attributed to Blockstream co-founder Austin Hill added friction to the conversation. In the circulated email, Hill urged Epstein and Joichi Ito to reduce or halt support for McCaleb-founded initiatives, naming Ripple and Stellar, and arguing that backing them would harm the broader crypto ecosystem.  The message also proposed a call to discuss next steps to “deal” with the issue, according to screenshots and reposts shared across platforms. Ripple CTO David Schwartz responded on social media to the resurfaced Hill email saying,

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. The sad part is, we really are all in this together, and this kind of attitude hurts everyone in the space.

The broader document release has also faced scrutiny outside crypto circles, with reporting noting problems in how victim identities were handled and calls for corrections. Meanwhile, despite the news, Ripple has continued its outreach to the XRP community by announcing XRP Community Day 2026. CNF reported that the event is scheduled for February 11 and 12 and will run across three live X Spaces covering ETFs, partnerships, wrapped XRP, and real-world use cases.