Ripple CTO says he lost $300K trading no-name altcoins

David Schwartz, Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer, has revealed he lost more than $300,000 investing in altcoins.

According to a Nov. 2 post on Quora asking readers if they had lost any money trading Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies, Schwartz stated that he had made a few crypto investments that he “ultimately had to write off as worthless.”

“I’ve bought quite a few cryptocurrencies that turned out to be disasters,” stated the Ripple CTO who is a very frequent Quora contributor.

“My total losses, just on tokens that became completely worthless, is just over $300,000.”

Schwartz listed 11 tokens in particular that turned out to be bad investments for him, including Blocktix (TIX), DICE, Flash (FLASH), Vezt (VEZT), Amp (AMP), Signal Token (SIG), Bee (BEE), Kind Ads Token (KIND), Pryze (PRYZ), KudosCoin (KUDOS), and Neuron (NRN). Many of the altcoins went to zero in 2017 and 2018.

Overall it seems quite lucky that Schwartz isn’t Ripple’s Chief Investment Officer given his history of bad investment decisions. The CTO also revealed in October that he sold 40,000 Ether (ETH) in 2012, when the price was under $1. With ETH currently priced at $454, Schwartz’s crypto stash would have been worth more than $18 million today. He also said that he sold an unspecified number of Bitcoin (BTC) for $750 and XRP at $0.10.

Many prominent investors’ hold altcoins as well as BTC. Billionaire Tim Draper said in September that he owned Bitcoin Cash (BCH), XRP, Tezos (XTZ), and Aragon (ANT) in addition to more than 30,000 BTC.