Epstein files reveal Bitcoin’s secret war as Ripple insiders expose a decade of explosive hidden industry sabotage
A decade-old e-mail is reviving questions on whether or not initiatives like Ripple posed a menace to Bitcoin’s improvement or merely served as rivals that some BTC backers sought to exclude.
The e-mail, dated July 31, 2014, seems to point out Austin Hill, then described as Blockstream’s chief government, telling the late Jeffrey Epstein and different recipients that “Ripple, and Jed McCaleb’s new Stellar [were] unhealthy for the ecosystem.” Blockstream is a Bitcoin-focused blockchain know-how agency.
The correspondence resurfaced after the US Department of Justice published thousands and thousands of pages of data underneath the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a disclosure that features emails, files, photographs, and movies tied to previous investigations.
What was within the e-mail?
The e-mail’s headline draw is clear (as Jeffrey Epstein is a poisonous magnet for consideration), and Blockstream’s present management has moved rapidly to disclaim any ongoing monetary connection.
However, the extra sturdy story is concerning the sender’s premise quite than the recipients’ notoriety.
Austin Hill argued that capital flowing into Ripple and Stellar wasn’t merely competitors. It was contamination. He considered these initiatives as threats that might “injury” Bitcoin’s future by diluting investor alignment, developer focus, and narrative energy.
To many maximalists of that period, the “ecosystem” was not a broad crypto class. It was Bitcoin, plus the infrastructure, that made the flagship digital asset extra usable with out compromising its ethos.
Thus, this worldview “justified” the precise stress utilized within the e-mail.
However, XRP group members view the e-mail as proof that early Bitcoin insiders sought to divert capital from Ripple.
For context, XRP commentator Leonidas Hadjiloizou argued the e-mail reads like an try and stress traders to “choose a horse” and to scale back or withdraw a Blockstream allocation if additionally they backed Ripple or Stellar.
According to him:
“The e-mail to Epstein and Joichi Ito by Austin Hill was simply one other effort by Bitcoin maxis to battle Ripple and Stellar.”
Meanwhile, the resurfaced e-mail has pulled in trendy Ripple voices who lived via these early battles.
Ripple CTO emeritus David Schwartz said he “wouldn’t be in any respect shocked” if the e-mail is “the tip of a large iceberg,” arguing that:
“Hill felt that help for Ripple or Stellar made somebody an enemy/opponent. It appears fairly seemingly that Hill and others expressed related views to many different individuals.”
In his view, standing in opposition to the supporters of rival networks as enemies hurts everybody within the house.
However, Schwartz additionally drew a boundary round what the e-mail doesn’t set up, noting there isn’t a proof of direct connections between Epstein and Ripple, XRP, or Stellar.
Is Ripple Really Bad for the Ecosystem?
The irony of Hill’s 2014 warning is that the “injury” he feared has arguably materialized, as Ripple has turn into a dominant power within the industry. In 2026, Ripple has not solely survived but additionally entrenched itself as a regulated pillar of the crypto infrastructure.
However, this progress occurred with out the catastrophic penalties for Bitcoin that maximalists initially predicted.
In reality, Ripple’s evolution over the last decade means that the “ecosystem” was at all times destined to be bigger than simply Bitcoin.
The agency’s most important milestone got here with the conclusion of its long-running battle with the SEC. The 2025 settlement, which noticed the corporate pay a fraction of the regulator’s unique demand, successfully cleared the regulatory cloud that had hung over the asset for years.
That authorized readability paved the best way for the very factor early Bitcoiners feared: deep institutional integration.
Today, the corporate appears to be like much less like a “rip-off” and extra like a financial institution with major licenses worldwide.
Moreover, Ripple has aggressively expanded its custody capabilities by buying Swiss-based Metaco and Standard Custody & Trust. It has additionally acquired main monetary platforms like GTreasury, Hidden Road, and the stablecoin platform Rail.
Perhaps the strongest rebuttal to the “unhealthy for the ecosystem” declare is the market’s acceptance of XRP as an institutional asset class.
The launch of XRP ETFs in late 2025, together with choices from issuers like Franklin Templeton, signaled that Wall Street now not views the asset as “contamination.”
Instead, the inflows into these merchandise recommend that for contemporary traders, the “ecosystem” will not be a zero-sum recreation between Bitcoin and funds networks. It is a diversified portfolio the place each “horses” can run.
Will Bitcoin and Ripple group members ever finish their bickering?
Long earlier than spot crypto ETFs and big-bank custody offers, the Bitcoin group fought public battles in boards over what counted as “good for the ecosystem.”
On Bitcointalk, one extensively circulated 2013 thread framed Ripple as opposite to Bitcoin’s objectives and criticized its construction and incentives, reflecting a pressure of skepticism that later hardened into the “maximalist” worldview.
Those criticisms tended to cluster round a few themes: governance management, token distribution, whether or not a challenge’s financial mannequin was “too company-led,” and whether or not its outreach to banks and regulators undercut Bitcoin’s political narrative.
However, supporters of Ripple and Stellar argued that sooner settlement rails, decrease transaction prices, and a concentrate on funds had been sensible options quite than ideological betrayals.
They contended that early Bitcoin discourse typically conflated “totally different design” with “existential menace.”
Meanwhile, even when the 2014 e-mail is primarily a time capsule, it maps onto a more moderen political and coverage battle that has shifted the Bitcoin-versus-Ripple debate from boards to lobbying.
In early 2025, Jack Mallers, the co-founder and CEO of Twenty One Capital, argued that Ripple was actively lobbying to prevent a Bitcoin-only Strategic Reserve in the US whereas selling its centralized, corporate-controlled XRP token.
According to him, XRP’s centralized nature conflicts with the objectives of a strategic BTC reserve which can be “pro-industry, pro-jobs, and pro-technology.”
That debate turned extra concrete when President Donald Trump mentioned a US strategic crypto reserve would come with XRP alongside Bitcoin and different main tokens.
The announcement sharpened an already acquainted fault line: Bitcoin maximalists advocating a single-asset financial reserve versus a multi-asset framework that advantages giant US-linked token networks.
These points clarify why the Bitcoin and Ripple communities look like in outright loggerheads over the previous years, regardless of the belongings being two of the preferred cryptocurrencies globally.
However, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse seems to be steering the XRP holders away from the “fights” by persistently urging cooperation and unity amongst industry gamers to assist the rising sector develop.
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