One Founding XRP Address, Confirmed in 2013 and Again in 2023
On 23 February 2013 a reader of the Bitcoin forum wrote that Joel Katz — the handle of David Schwartz, who wrote much of the XRP Ledger’s code — held 1,060,024.99997 XRP. The ledger from that morning holds exactly that balance at one address. Ten years later, a file published on Schwartz’s own domain names the same address. No other account from the ledger’s first surviving day is confirmed from both ends, and the million XRP inside that figure had arrived the day before the post.
The post, the ledger, and a match to the drop
The post opens the thread “So … who can do an analysis of some famous Ripple addresses?” and gives the figure to five decimal places, read off the public graph tool of the day: “Joel Katz currently has 1,060,024.99997 XRPs”. The address is rHzWtXTB…19fF. It entered recorded history on 1 January 2013, in ledger 32,570, holding 10,000 XRP with sequence number 1 — the counter every account keeps of transactions it has signed, so a 1 means it had signed none. Three payments then arrived within eleven days.
Between the payments the account set three trust lines — the ledger entry that lets an account hold a token other than XRP — and each cost the fee of the day, 10 drops, a drop being one millionth of an XRP. So: 10,000 + 25 + 50,000 + 1,000,000 − 0.00003 = 1,060,024.99997. The third trust line was set at 00:57 UTC on 23 February. The balance ends in a 7 only from that moment (before it, the last digit was an 8), and the post carries the 7, so the post was written after it. Ledger 264,216 closed at 02:00 UTC, 23 February 2013 with the balance unchanged.
Who sent the million
The 25 XRP came from another of the 136 accounts that existed on the ledger’s first surviving day, one that also began with 10,000 XRP. The 50,000 came from rJR7gjNe…, an account created twenty minutes earlier by r3kmLJN5… and which went on to create 3,409 accounts of its own — the shape of an account-funding service, not of a person’s wallet. The million came from r3kmLJN5… directly.
That account is listed as Ripple’s in XRPScan’s registry of well-known addresses, and the ledger shows it creating Jed McCaleb’s tacostand account on 10 January 2013 and the funding account above on 20 February. A registry entry records who a third party believes holds a key; the ledger records what the key did. Both point the same way here, and neither says what the payment was for.
The same address, in the owner’s own words, ten years later
An XRPL account can carry a Domain. On 1 January 2023, 07:48 UTC, in ledger 76,819,012, rHzWtXTB…19fF set its domain to distributedagreement.com (96835BCD…). That domain publishes an xrp-ledger.toml file which opens “I am David Schwartz / I am currently CTO at Ripple”, gives the handle @joelkatz, and lists rHzWtXTB…19fF with the note “Primary address used for NFT projects”.
What is established, and what is not
Two weeks after the million arrived, in the same thread, Schwartz answered a question about whether developer holdings could be read out of the ledger: “Opencoin does not compensate employees or Ripple developers with XRP.” (8 March 2013). To a reply the next day suggesting the company would keep 50 billion as its own compensation: “There’s no 50 billion going to employees or developers.” (9 March 2013).
Both statements are on the record, and so is the payment. Whether they conflict is not established. A transfer from a company-operated account can be a purchase, a loan, an operating float, or a personal transfer by someone who also used that account; the ledger records the amount and the two addresses, never the reason. The label on r3kmLJN5… is a registry attribution, not a signature. What can be said is narrower: on 22 February 2013 an account attributed to Ripple sent a million XRP to Schwartz’s address; on 23 February a forum post reported the balance; on 8 March Schwartz said the company did not pay developers in XRP.
A working wallet, not a vault
The account did not sit still. 9,535 transactions touch it, 7,546 of them sent by it, the first on 11 February 2013 and the most recent on 6 September 2026. Its sequence number today is 7,547 — one more than the transactions it has signed, which is how the counter works. It owns 38 ledger objects (trust lines, offers, NFTs) and holds 4,808.51 XRP. The million of February 2013 is long gone. What stayed constant is the key, and the domain file says what the account is for now: NFT projects.
Sources
- ripper234, 23 February 2013 — the post with the figure; JoelKatz, 8 March 2013 and 9 March 2013 — the compensation statements. All three in bitcointalk topic 146143.
- The three payments and three trust lines: AFF80FC5…, 6F075AEE…, 2E402EF6… and A23F55D9…, 465FDD98…, FB5141C1…. The domain setting: 96835BCD….
- Ledger 32,570 state and the ledger 264,216 header from a full-history server (s1.ripple.com), read on 2026-09-06; current balance and sequence from the same server.
- distributedagreement.com/.well-known/xrp-ledger.toml and XRPScan’s entry for r3kmLJN5….
- The 3,409 accounts created by rJR7gjNe… and the creation of tacostand by r3kmLJN5… are read from each account’s first transaction, the way the distribution article does it.