The 10-year-old email has once again raised questions about whether projects like Ripple posed a threat to Bitcoin’s development or merely served as a competitor that some BTC backers sought to eliminate.
In an email dated July 31, 2014, Blockstream CEO Austin Hill appears to have told recipients, including the late Jeffrey Epstein, that “Ripple and Jed McCaleb’s new Stellar have had a negative impact on the ecosystem.” Blockstream is a blockchain technology company focused on Bitcoin.
The exchange resurfaced after the U.S. Department of Justice released millions of pages of records under the Epstein File Transparency Act. This includes emails, files, images and videos related to past investigations.
What was written in the email?
It was obvious that this email’s headline would garner attention (Jeffrey Epstein is a toxic attention seeker), and Blockstream’s current management quickly moved to deny any ongoing financial connections.
But the more enduring story is about the sender’s assumptions, not the recipient’s notoriety.
Austin Hill argued that the capital flowing into Ripple and Stellar is more than just competition. It was pollution. He viewed these projects as a threat that could “damage” Bitcoin’s future by weakening investor alignment, developer focus, and narrative power.
For many maximalists at the time, “ecosystem” was not a broad category of cryptocurrencies. It was Bitcoin and infrastructure that made its flagship digital asset more usable without compromising its spirit.
This worldview thus “justified” certain pressures placed on email.
However, members of the XRP community see the email as evidence that early Bitcoin insiders were trying to divert funds from Ripple.
For context, XRP commentator Leonidas Hadjiroizou argued that the email appears to pressure investors to “pick their horses” and reduce or withdraw their Blockstream allocations if they support Ripple or Stellar.
According to him:
“Austin Hill’s email to Epstein and Joichi Ito is just another effort by Bitcoin Maxis to fight Ripple and Stellar.”
Meanwhile, the resurfaced emails have attracted modern Ripple voices who survived these early battles.
David Schwartz, Ripple’s chief technology officer emeritus, said he “wouldn’t be surprised at all” if the email was “the tip of a huge iceberg.”
“Hill felt that his support for Ripple and Stellar made someone an enemy/opponent. It seems very likely that Hill and others expressed similar views against many others.”
In his view, confronting supporters of rival networks as enemies hurts everyone in the space.
However, Schwartz also drew the line on what the emails did not prove, pointing out that there is no evidence of a direct relationship between Epstein and Ripple, XRP, or Stellar.
Is Ripple really bad for the ecosystem?
The irony of Hill’s 2014 warning is that with Ripple becoming a dominant force in the industry, the “damage” he feared has likely come true. In 2026, Ripple has not only survived, but established itself as a regulated pillar of crypto infrastructure.
However, this growth occurred without the catastrophic consequences for Bitcoin that maximalists had originally predicted.
In fact, Ripple’s evolution over the past decade suggests that the “ecosystem” was always destined to be bigger than just Bitcoin.
The company’s most important milestone came with the end of a long battle with the SEC. The 2025 settlement effectively lifted a regulatory cloud that had hung over the assets for years, with the company paying part of the regulator’s original demands.
This legal clarity paved the way for what early Bitcoiners feared: deep institutional integration.
Now, the company looks less like a “scam” and more like a bank with major licenses around the world.
Additionally, Ripple has aggressively expanded its custody capabilities by acquiring Swiss-based companies Metaco and Standard Custody & Trust. It has also acquired major financial platforms such as GTreasury, Hidden Road, and stablecoin platform Rail.
Perhaps the strongest counterargument to the “ecosystem harm” argument is market acceptance of XRP as an institutional asset class.
The launch of the XRP ETF in late 2025, including offers from issuers such as Franklin Templeton, showed that Wall Street no longer views the asset as “tainted.”
Rather, the influx into these products suggests that for modern investors, the “ecosystem” is not a zero-sum game between Bitcoin and payment networks. It is a diversified portfolio that allows both “horses” to run.
Will Bitcoin and Ripple community members ever stop bickering?
Long before the advent of spot crypto ETFs and big bank custody transactions, the Bitcoin community was engaged in public forum battles over what constituted “good for the ecosystem.”
On Bitcointalk, one widely circulated thread in 2013 treated Ripple as antithetical to Bitcoin’s goals and criticized its structure and incentives. This reflects the skepticism that later hardened into a “maximalist” worldview.
These criticisms tended to focus on several themes, including governance controls, token distribution, whether the project’s economic model is “too corporate-driven,” and whether lobbying banks and regulators undermines Bitcoin’s political narrative.
But Ripple and Stellar supporters argued that faster payment rails, lower transaction costs, and a focus on payments were pragmatic features rather than ideological betrayals.
They argued that early Bitcoin discussions often conflated “different design” with “existential threat.”
Meanwhile, even if the 2014 email is primarily a time capsule, it reflects a more recent political and policy conflict that has moved the Bitcoin vs. Ripple debate from forums to lobbying.
In early 2025, Twenty One Capital co-founder and CEO Jack Mallers claimed that Ripple was actively lobbying to prevent the introduction of a Bitcoin-only strategic reserve in the United States while promoting the company’s centrally controlled XRP token.
According to him, the centralized nature of XRP conflicts with the Strategic BTC Reserve’s goals of “supporting industry, supporting employment, and supporting technology.”
This discussion became more concrete when President Donald Trump said that the U.S. Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve would include XRP alongside Bitcoin and other major tokens.
The announcement sharpened an already well-known fault line. Bitcoin maximalists advocate a single-asset monetary reserve and a multi-asset framework that benefits a large token network linked to the US.
These issues explain why Bitcoin and Ripple assets have appeared to be completely at odds over the past few years, despite being two of the most popular cryptocurrencies globally.
However, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has consistently encouraged cooperation and unity among industry players to support the growth of the emerging sector, and appears to be trying to keep XRP holders out of the “fight”.