Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz told a roomful of financial advisors to prepare for XRP to have another lackluster year. 

Novogratz made his comments as apart of an onstage panel at TD Ameritrade’s National LINC 2020 conference in Orlando, Florida last week. The fund manager blamed Ripple for XRP’s underwhelming forecast, despite being one of Galaxy Digital’s largest investments. 

In a Q&A series at the end of the discussion, Novogratz was asked by a financial adviser audience member about his opinion on XRP. 

According to a report by CoinDesk, who received a forbidden audio recording from the event, Novogratz found issue with Ripple’s massive stake in XRP. He said:

Ripple the company owns 60 billion of the coins, of the XRP. That’s a lot of it.

He continued, 

When I’m buying a stock, if I know [someone’s] selling $10 billion-worth of it at some price, it makes me less excited to buy the stock.

Novogratz’s comments reflect the general frustration expressed by a subset of XRP investors who have become vocal over Ripple’s continued selling of XRP. Last August, more than 2,000 investors signed a petition urging Ripple to stop selling XRP.

Ripple’s VP of global institutional markets Breanne Madigan responded to Novogratz’s remarks in an email to CoinDesk, saying, 

XRP is a digital asset. It is not a stock as it does not give you any stake in Ripple or any other company…These statements make clear that Mike doesn’t understand how Ripple manages its stake in XRP and didn’t take time to read what we make publicly available every quarter.

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