In this informal conversation Sam Parr and a guest recount the rise of Ripple and its XRP token, highlighting how the founders amassed billions before the product saw real banking adoption, which fostered a reputation of centralization and greed within the crypto community. The guest describes a bold, never‑executed plan to perform the first hostile takeover of a crypto network: an airdrop of a new token into every XRP holder’s wallet, paired with a manifesto promising massive multipliers (5x, 4x, 3x) for early participants who would send their XRP to a designated address. The scheme relied on game‑theoretic pressure to force holders to dump XRP, crashing its price and allowing the attackers to launch a competing project. To fund the operation, the conspirators sought $200 million, securing $50 million initially. The plan was leaked to journalist Dan Primack of Axios, prompting Ripple to pre‑emptively sell a portion of its holdings and create a multi‑hundred‑million‑dollar liquidity buffer, effectively neutralizing the attack. The discussion draws parallels to 1980s corporate hostile takeovers (e.g., Drexel, greenmail) and George Soros’s Bank of England attack, underscoring the high‑stakes, almost‑James‑Bond nature of the plot, which ultimately never materialized.
Chapters
Have you ever heard of Ripple?
Yeah, but they, they're shady, right?
Okay. So Ripple was this thing kind of like started pretty early on. Um, and they had this like, you know, honestly not a bad idea. They were like, look, uh, you know, the way the international banking system works today is off this thing called the SWIFT standard. Ripple was like, we are gonna be a bank-to-bank communication layer that uses blockchain, right? So they were like, we're gonna use blockchain technology with a real use case, which is banks sending money back and forth to each other. So that was their idea. They got a bunch of funding from Founders Fund and others, and they released this thing called XRP. That's the name of their token. All right, so whatever. Nobody cares about that, how it works. Nobody cares. But the interesting part is XRP has like— was worth a lot. The founders of Ripple became billionaires overnight before— like, that's the thing with crypto. You can get rich before— like, this OpenDAO has $130 million before they have a product. In Ripple, those guys became billionaires before banks ever used their product, which is like a really fucked up incentive, and which is why Sometimes shit doesn't actually get built in crypto because, hey, I already got the millions, I could just run away, I could just do a half-assed job, it doesn't really matter at this point. I went public on day one. So Ripple, um, has a market cap right now of, um, $94— is this right? $94 billion? I think I'm reading this right. $94 billion, something like that. No, no, sorry, $44 billion. $44 billion, right? That's like That's like the market cap of like, you know, Bank of America or some shit like that. So obviously Ripple's not actually valued at that, but Ripple had believers and they had early momentum. They were very early in the crypto games. They had a lot of PR and the CEO would go on CNBC and talk about how this is going to change the game. So what happened in the crypto community? People were kind of like poo-pooing Ripple. They're like, this is like centralized. They, they took way too much share for themselves. They didn't give enough to users. That's why these guys are billionaires. Their product kind of sucks and they're kind of shady, whatever, whatever. That's the reputation was Ripple. Anybody who was in the know in crypto, pretty much the general consensus was Ripple's full of shit. And so my buddy had this idea. He was like, he was like, I'm going to do the first hostile takeover of a crypto network. I was like, what do you mean? He goes, look, I can see every single person's wallet who owns Ripple. I was like, okay, that's kind of interesting. He goes, I go, but you don't know their name. And I was like, because I don't need their name. I was like, you don't have their email address. He goes, I don't need their email address. I could just put something in their wallet. And they'll wake up and they'll open their wallet and they'll see that they have something in it. I was like, okay, he goes, so I'm gonna go out there, I'm gonna say XRP is stupid for these 5 reasons. Number 1, the founders took—
can you message these people anything?
You can include a message in the transaction of giving them the thing, like in the memo of the, of the thing. But like, the way you do it is you first drop the token, you tell people, hey, if you held Ripple, you got this token today, and then you write your manifesto on your Twitter or your website about what this is all about. So you It's like kind of like somebody put a $50 check in your wallet. You're like, what's this all about? It says go to this website to explain why you just got this $50. So that's how this, that's how this marketing mechanism works. So he was like, I'm gonna put some money in there. I'm gonna put my currency in all the Ripple holders' wallet, and then I'm gonna tell them Ripple is stupid for these 5 reasons. The founders took too much. This other problem, this other problem, you know, they're the, the token is inflationary, blah, blah, blah. So I'm gonna change all that. We only take 10%, we are not inflationary, we do not do this sketchy shit, blah blah blah. My 5-point plan of how to make Ripple better. Um, and we're, we're calling it our own thing. And here's the deal: if you own Ripple, if you send your Ripple to my wallet, I will send you back 5 times your value of this if you're in the first— for the first 1,000 people that do this. Then for the next 10,000 people that do this, you're gonna get 4 times your, your Ripple back. And for the next 10,000 people, you're going to get 3 times your Ripple back. So basically there's this urgency of like, okay, if these— if this is going to become the next Ripple, if I send my money in now, I'm going to get 5— I'm going to get a 5x multiplier on my money. And what he was going to do was just— he goes, when you send it to this wallet, we're going to just dump it. We're just going to sell it. And we're going to put so much sell pressure, we're going to crash the price of Ripple. So if you do it—
and then do they do this?
Or someone finish the story. So he goes, if you do this early, you're going to get 5 times your amount. And you're not gonna sit there holding the bag while we dump this thing. It's like a prisoner's dilemma game theory. It was so genius. He's like, he's like, here's the math. If you're, if you're holding this thing, you have to assess, are other people gonna take them up on this offer? If they do, then the Ripple I'm holding is gonna go down like crazy. I'm gonna go down like 5 to 10x.
Golly.
If I jump, if I jump ship, I get a 5x multiplier on my money and I don't sit there holding the sinking ship. And the game theory of this, I think, was gonna work. So he has this plan and he starts, and he starts, uh, and so he's like, okay, well, he needs to be credible. So he went to some very, very wealthy people and he got about $50 million lined up to do this hostile takeover. And he was like, he needed it to be like $200 million. And so he's like, I need to create this huge war chest so I can tell people, look, we have this much money. So you, this, it's backed by something. Come on board. And he's like, dude, I— he's like, basically I'm going to these investors, I'm saying if you give me $200 million, I'm gonna take down this project, I'm gonna absorb all the value of this project that's currently worth $40 billion, right? So he's like, it's a huge return for those investors, and they also don't even believe in Ripple. So it was this high-stakes fucking James Bond shit. What the problem was, one of the investors that he had went to for this leaked the plan to a journalist. This guy, uh, Dan Primack or whatever, he's like pretty famous journalist.
Yeah, from Axios.
Axios. Axios writes the story ahead of time. He says, hey, there's somebody planning a hostile takeover XRP, and here's how it's going to work. And XRP, obviously the Ripple team obviously sees this and they're like, okay, just in case. They— so they sold some amount of their Ripple, um, to create a like few hundred million dollar buffer so that if somebody tried to do this and tried to tank the price they had enough liquidity to buy back the, buy back the tokens and keep the price high. So it kind of foiled his plan where they— the only, the only way it would have worked is if he had caught them by surprise, and he could have done it in like a 2-day period. He could have tanked the price of Ripple and created this competitor and had all the momentum on his side. But because they had heads up, they could create enough liquidity and they could be able to like support their price before somebody could do this to them. But how crazy is that, dude?
This is like some Barbarians at the Gate shit. Like, this is like 1980s, like, Drexel, like, hostile takeover where they like were like— what's it called? The greenmailing. Have you ever read like these like 1980s finance?
I have, I have the book, but I haven't read it yet.
Yeah, that's basically what they did. Like, it was like, it was like warfare.
I was like, this is some George Soros shit, you know, the George Soros broke the Bank of England. That's actually what he was telling me. He goes, this is some George Soros shit. And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, George Soros broke the Bank of England by doing something very similar to this. And as he was explaining, I was like, there's no way this works. He's like, well, you know, it's risky, but like if it works—
who did it?
And he didn't end up doing it.
But I mean, who's the— it's an article. Is it public?
I don't know if it's public, but I'll tell you, it's our friend who— remember we went to dinner after our live show in Miami? It's our friend.
We went to dinner.
Okay.
Okay. Yeah, that's crazy. I thought if, if Dan would have wrote about it, he would have named him.
Yeah, I think he didn't know the name, or he— I don't think he included the name in the thing. But how fucking nuts is that?
That's crazy. If you get— if that person could have pulled it off, that's wild. This is Barbarians at the Gate shit, hostile takeover stuff.
