Matthew Mellon: A $1 Billion XRP Fortune on Paper, Dead at 54

On 16 April 2018, Matthew Mellon was found dead in a hotel room in Cancún, Mexico. He was 54. He had flown there to check into a clinic for treatment of an addiction to OxyContin, a prescription painkiller, and never arrived. Early news reports said he died at the rehab centre; the Associated Press later corrected that after Cancún police said he was found in his hotel.

Three months earlier, on paper, he had been a billionaire. In February 2018 Forbes reported that about $2 million he had put into a cryptocurrency called XRP in 2017 had grown to roughly $1 billion at the market's peak. "My family thought I was insane, when I knew it was a home run," he told the magazine.

The heir who bet on a bank coin

Mellon was born in New York in 1964 into two old American banking families. On his father's side he descended from Thomas Mellon, founder of the Pittsburgh banking dynasty; on his mother's, from Anthony Drexel of the Drexel banking house. He studied at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, founded the men's shoe brand Harry's of London in 2001, and in 2011 was named finance chairman of the New York Republican State Committee. He was married first to Tamara Mellon, co-founder of the shoe brand Jimmy Choo, and later to the designer Nicole Hanley. He had three children: Araminta, with Tamara, and Force and Olympia, with Nicole.

He spoke openly about his health. He had bipolar disorder, and he told interviewers his OxyContin habit had cost him about $100,000 a month. He called the drug "legal heroin" and said it needed to be addressed.

His crypto bet was unusual. XRP is a digital token created by Ripple, a San Francisco company that sells payment software to banks; Ripple itself held most of the supply. Mellon said he liked it because it worked with the banking system rather than against it. In stock-market terms, it was like buying a large stake in a company's own currency at pennies and watching it go up several hundred times in a year. XRP peaked at about $3.84 in early January 2018, then fell by more than three quarters before he died.

A fortune on hidden devices

Mellon had told Forbes that the keys to his holdings were split up and kept in cold storage around the country under other people's names. A private key is the password that moves a crypto holding; whoever holds it controls the money, and if it is lost no bank can reset it. Cold storage means keeping those keys on devices that never touch the internet, the digital version of cash in several safe deposit boxes. It is good protection against hackers and bad protection against sudden death. His will was out of date and did not mention it.

For a time after his death, crypto websites reported that the fortune might be lost forever. It was not. In December 2021 the Daily Dot published a review of more than 700 pages of court filings from the estate. They showed that the XRP was worth about $193 million at his death, around 97% of an estate valued at about $197 million, and that the estate's lawyers reached it by going directly to Ripple.

Selling a sinking asset, a few coins a day

Access did not mean freedom to sell. While he was alive, Mellon had signed an agreement with Ripple that capped how much XRP he could sell each day, a lock-up of the kind that stops a big holder flooding the market. The agreement bound his estate too. The lawyers wanted to sell quickly, because XRP had swung up and down by about 30% in the weeks after his death, but according to the filings they could negotiate only a slightly higher limit. Attempts to remove the cap or sell in bulk failed, and anyone familiar with the settlement had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, so the exact daily figure has never been published. Ripple did not comment.

So the estate sold, day after day, while the price fell. By the end of 2019 XRP was trading around 19 cents and the estate was worth less than half its starting value. "One might think that an estate comprised 97% by a single asset would be a straightforward matter to administer," its lawyers wrote. "This estate has been anything but straightforward."

The bills were large. Mellon had been years behind on his income tax returns. About two dozen people filed claims against the estate, for amounts from a few hundred dollars to nearly $6 million; the largest came from a former friend, Stacy Engman, over a verbal promise to invest in her sunglasses line. A former housekeeper's sexual harassment lawsuit was settled for $282,500. In late 2020 the estate paid $60 million in federal estate tax, its biggest single bill. It settled its last debts in January 2021, almost three years after his death. The children's inheritances are held by a trustee.

The timing was close. In December 2020 the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple, alleging that XRP sales were unregistered securities offerings, and the price fell sharply. That case ended only in 2025, after a judge ordered Ripple to pay a $125 million civil penalty and both sides dropped their appeals.

What the record shows

The cause of death has not been officially published. Forbes and the Daily Mail later reported that he died of a heart attack after taking ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew, before he was due at a clinic that used another psychedelic, ibogaine, to treat addiction. No official finding has been released.

Mellon's estate became a standard case study for lawyers who handle crypto inheritances. Gerry Beyer, a Texas Tech law professor who specialises in estates, told the Daily Dot he had never heard of such a crazy thing. The money was not lost, as Gerald Cotten's customers' money effectively was when the QuadrigaCX founder died in 2018. It was simply worth far less by the time anyone could sell it.