BitBoy Crypto supposedly holds $80 million in XRP, yet asks community for donations

Ben Armstrong, also known as ‘BitBoy Crypto’, has recently become entangled in a lawsuit against his former partners from HIT Network, regarding assets seizure that were registered under their company’s name, but Armstrong claims belong to him.

The former BitBoy Crypto employee is now asking for donations from the crypto community using emotional videos sharing his story, and on September 21, he shared a multi-millionaire XRP address, in response to supposed requests for a donation address by the XRP community.

“Several people have asked about an $XRP donation address for my legal fund (…) XRP Address: ‘rJmXYcKCGJSayp4sAdp6Eo4CdSFtDVv7WG’ (…) Thanks for the support”.

— Ben Armstrong (@BenArmstrongsX)

Thousands of dollars in XRP were already sent in the last 24 hours to the given Ben Armstrong address, with lots of these payments being from known centralized exchange accounts.

BitBoy address has over 160 million XRP

Interestingly, this address — that is supposedly under his control — has a balance of 161.54 million XRP tokens ($81.94 million), with the first transaction of 10 XRP received on February 19, 2023, according to on-chain data from BitHomp. This first payment was sent by a Crypto.com account.

Historic transaction data for the address over the last 30 days shows a consistent daily payment flow since August 22, with a spike of over 5 million XRP in 181 payments, on September 5.

After posting the address on X (formerly Twitter), the number of payments slightly spiked, but not the volume. Which indicates smaller transactions, usually what is seen from donations. 

On September 21, BitBoy’s XRP address received a total of 230 payments, summing up to 315,360 XRP ($160,800).

Notably, with current information, it is impossible to know whether these funds come from Ben Armstrong’s personal stash, from donations to his channel (formerly owned by his dissolved company), or from some other unknown origin. 

Does this XRP address really belong to BitBoy Crypto?

GuinnessStache (@guinnessstache) commented that it is possible that this address belongs to a centralized exchange, that is linked to a private account by Ben Armstrong through the tag “3259094467”. In this case, the $80 million would belong to the suggested institution, instead of Armstrong himself.