Ripple Team and Founder’s Biography

Ripple is one of the most famous cryptocurrencies and is considered the third cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and Ethereum. At the moment the company has a total market cap of about $10 dollars. The good thing about Ripple is that it is much cheaper than the rest of the big cryptocurrencies due to having a considerable amount of coins in circulation with that amount being approximately 45 billion. This amount is only 45 percent of the initial 100 billion coins that were created and is slowly getting released to the market.

Ripple has been a well known brand for quite a while now and in spite of all the controversy it has received during these years, it also has accumulated a fair number of followers and believers. Since its launch, Ripple has found many investors who have created their portfolios using Ripple by now. Now, you might wonder who was the team behind the company and how it was founded. In this article, we are going to talk just about that, so read along.

 

Chris Larson

Christian Larsen was born in San Francisco in 1960. His father was an aircraft mechanic working for the United Airlines at San Francisco International Airport and his mother was a freelance illustrator. Larsen attended San Francisco university after finishing high school and succeeded in getting a B.S. in business and accounting 24 years after his birth. Upon reaching this point, he started working for Chevron, doing financial audits in different countries such as Ecuador, Indonesia and Brazil. In 1991, Larsen graduated with an M.B.A from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Chris Larsen is a business executive and angel investor mostly famous for co-founding several Silicon Valley technology start-ups for instance, in 1996, he co-founded an online mortgage lender platform based on peer to peer lending called E-Loan. During his time as the CEO of E-Loan, Larsen made the company the first one to freely provide the customers with FICO credit scores.

 

Jed McCaleb

Jed McCaleb was the co-founder of the company and one of the main members of the Ripple team. He worked on the currency system and helped build XRP for Ripple. in 2014, McCaleb took his share from the company and left the team. He then co-founded Stellar, a non-profit organization which had its own cryptocurrency system. Even though he once had a major role in Ripple, now he serves as Chief Technology Officer at Stellar.

 

Brad Garlinghouse

Brad is the current CEO of the company and is a member of the Board of directors. Before joining the Ripple team, Brad worked as the CEO of Hightail – a file collaboration service. In the years 2009 – 2012, Garlinghouse served as the President of Consumer Applications at AOL and even before that, he held a couple of different positions at Yahoo! Including Senior Vice President; this was through the years 2003 till 2009. Earlier in his life, Garlinghouse helped with the VoIP industry as the CEO of Dialpad Communications.

 

David Schwartz

The American Cryptographer and programmer and now the Chief Technology Officer in Ripple, graduated from the University of Houston majoring in electrical engineering in the year 1990. He is among the original designers of XRP Ledger. Before joining up with the Ripple team, David had the same position in WebMaster Inc. he used to develop encrypted storage spaces in the Cloud space and designing message and communication systems for such organisations as the National Security Agency (NSA) and even CNN. He is considered a respected voice in the world of cryptocurrencies and is also known as JoelKatz.

 

Eric van Miltenburg

Eric is a great leader and the Chief Business Officer at Ripple with over 20 years’ worth of experience in leadership, business development, business operations, strategic planning, and corporate development. Before joining Ripple, the man held senior positions with some of the famous start-up companies and even some really big ones including Yahoo!, Adobe, Work.com, Hightail, Excite@Home.com, and RedSwoosh. Miltenburg is famous for his high amount of experience in solving complex business problems and being able to execute great business strategies that help with a company’s growth.

 

Monica Long

Monica Long is the GM of RippleX. She has aided a lot of technology companies drive through changes in the cryptocurrency industry all throughout her career. Prior to joining up with the Ripple team, Long worked with corporate communications at Intuit. Before that, she used to support start-up clients in different B2C and B2B sectors.

 

Start of Ripple

In 2004, Ryan Fugger came up with the idea of Ripple when he was working on a local exchange trading system in Canada. The goal was to build a monetary system which was centralized and was able to empower communities or individuals to create their own money effectively. Fugger created an early version of such a system as a test and called it RipplePay.com. At the same time, Jed McCaleb started to work on a digital currency system where participants if the network could validate the transactions via consensus rather than a mining process similar to the one Bitcoin uses.

In August of 2012, Jed McCaleb hired Chris Larsen and they went to Ryan Fugger together to tell him about their idea of the digital currency system. After discussions between McCaleb, Larsen, Fugger and the Ripple Community members, Fugger agreed to the offer and handed over the reins. The same year, in September, Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb co-founded a new company on the same grounds Ripple was built on and called OpenCoin.

 

OpenCoin

OpenCoin started to develop the idea and built RTXP or better known as the Ripple Protocol. With the system made, the company also created Ripple exchange and payment network. In April of 2013, the company officially announced that an angel round of funding had been closed with several venture capital firms. In the same month, the company acquired SimpleHoney in order to aid them make their virtual currency more famous and make it easier for the average people. In September of 2013, OpenCoin rebranded and changed its name to Ripple Labs.