Newly resurfaced documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s files include: shine light on On the aggressive tribalism of the early crypto industry.
Prominent investors were pressured to view $XRP and stella $XLM Supporters are a threat to the Bitcoin ecosystem, according to a 2014 email chain analyzed by Ripple’s former chief technology officer David “Joel Katz” Schwartz.
“A star is not that stellar” email
The dispute stems from an email dated July 31, 2014. The email was sent by entrepreneur Austin Hill to a group of prominent investors, including Reid Hoffman, Joi Ito, and disgraced investor Jeffrey Epstein.
In the email, titled “Stella is not so Stella,” Hill urges investors to reconsider financial support for the project led by Ripple and Stellar co-founder Jed McCaleb. Hill writes:
“The new namesake of Ripple and Jed is detrimental to the ecosystem we are building. It is detrimental to our company to have investors backing two horses in the same race.”
Mr. Hill went on to request that investors “reduce or cancel their allocations” and offered to explain the matter in more detail over the phone.
What he meant was that anyone who supports either Ripple or Stellar feels bad for the ecosystem. $XRP or $XLM was the enemy/enemy.
Ultimatum: “Choose your horse”
According to Leonidas Hadjiroizou, Austin Hill used “allocation” as leverage.
In the venture capital world, being able to invest in promising companies (like Blockstream) is considered a privilege.
Mr. Hill threatened to “reduce or take away his allocation” from Mr. Epstein and Mr. Ito regarding their investment in Blockstream.
He was essentially saying that if you continue to support Ripple and Stellar, you can’t invest in Blockstream. He forced them to choose sides of the “race.”
“The sad truth is that we are all truly in this together and this type of attitude hurts everyone in the room,” Schwartz said in a recent social media post.
