- The “Stellar isn’t so stellar” email
- The ultimatum: “pick a horse”
Newly resurfaced documents from the Jeffrey Epstein files have shed light on the aggressive tribalism of the early cryptocurrency industry.
High-profile investors were pressured to view XRP and Stellar XLM supporters as threats to the Bitcoin ecosystem, according to a 2014 email chain analyzed by Ripple’s former Chief Technology Officer David “JoelKatz” Schwartz
The “Stellar isn’t so stellar” email
The controversy stems from an email dated July 31, 2014. It was sent by entrepreneur Austin Hill to a group of high-profile investors, including Reid Hoffman, Joichi Ito, and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
In the email, titled “Stellar isn’t so Stellar,” Hill urges the investors to reconsider their financial support for projects led by Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of both Ripple and Stellar. Hill writes:
“Ripple, and Jed’s new stellar are bad for the ecosystem we are building, and it does our company damage to have investors who are backing two horses in the same race.”
Hill goes on to request that the investors “reduce or take your allocation away,” offering to explain the issues further in a call.
He meant that because he felt Ripple and Stellar were bad for the ecosystem, anyone who supported either XRP or XLM was an opponent/enemy.
The ultimatum: “pick a horse”
According to Leonidas Hadjiloizou, Austin Hill was using “allocation” as leverage.
In the venture capital world, being allowed to invest in a promising company (like Blockstream) is often considered a privilege.
Hill threatened to “reduce or take… allocation away” from Epstein and Ito regarding their investment in Blockstream.
He was essentially telling them they could not invest in Blockstream if they continued to support Ripple or Stellar. He forced them to choose one side of the “race”.
“The sad part is, we really are all in this together, and this kind of attitude hurts everyone in the space,” Schwartz said in a recent social media post.
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