Jed McCaleb is the founder and CTO of Ripple company. McCaleb is also the founder and CEO of the aviation venture company Vast.
Jed McCaleb Life
Jed McCaleb is an American programmer, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the founder and CEO of the aviation startup Vast and the co-founder and CTO of Stellar. Before founding Stellar, he founded the Ripple company until 2013 and served as its CTO. McCaleb’s fortune, as of March 2023, is worth $2.4 billion, according to Forbes’ Billionaires List.
McCaleb was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas and attended the University of California, Berkeley. He eventually dropped out of school and moved to New York.
In 2000, McCaleb founded MetaMachine Inc. and released the eDonkey2000 application. Sam Yagan joined him in 2001 and served as the company’s CEO. McCaleb served as the company’s CTO and continued to develop the end-to-end eDonkey network as well as the Overnet network and eDonkey2000 application. At its peak, the network has grown to have over 4 million active users at any given time. In September 2006, the company reached an agreement with the RIAA and agreed that the company and its top executives would “immediately cease distribution of eDonkey, eDonkey2000, Overnet, and other software versions” and that the company pay the RIAA $30 million.
In 2007, he bought the domain Mtgox.com to create a trading site for Magic: The Gathering cards. After moving from his original idea, McCaleb redesigned the site in late 2010 as a bitcoin exchange capable of processing bitcoin-to-dollar trades. The website has grown in popularity over the months. McCaleb sold the company to Mark Karpeles in February 2011 and remained a minority owner of the company until its collapse in 2014.
In 2011, McCaleb began developing a digital currency in which transactions are verified by consensus among network members, known as the Ripple protocol, unlike the mining technique used in Bitcoin. He hired David Schwartz and received an investment from Jesse Powell before adding Arthur Britto as chief strategist. McCaleb hired Chris Larsen as CEO of the new company known as Opencoin. Before McCaleb left his active role at the company in July 2013, he continued to develop the Ripple protocol and currency while securing investments.
In 2014, he co-founded the nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation with Joyce Kim to develop the Stellar open source protocol to allow cross-border monetary transactions, including fiat and digital currencies. The organization debuted on July 31, 2014, and took a $3 million loan from tech company Stripe. The organization initially based its payment network on the Ripple protocol that McCaleb had previously developed, but adopted the Stellar Consensus Protocol in 2015. McCaleb serves as Stellar’s chief technology officer.
In May 2017, McCaleb also launched Lightyear.io, a commercial venture on the Stellar network. Lightyear initially facilitated Stellar, which has become a global payments and currency exchange for the developing world. In October 2017, Lightyear partnered with IBM to launch blockchain banking in the South Pacific using Stellar’s lumens currency. In September 2018, McCaleb negotiated the merger of Lightyear and Chain.com, creating a new combined entity called InterStellar.
The New York Times cited McCaleb as one of the top 10 people to spearhead the blockchain revolution in 2018.
In 2021, McCaleb founded the aerospace company Vast. Vast’s announced mission was to develop artificial gravity space stations. As of 2023, McCaleb is Vast’s CEO and sole funder.
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