Jed McCaleb
Jed McCaleb (1975) is the co-founder and STO (development foundation) of Stellar. Before establishing the Stellar, McCaleb founded Ripple company and worked here till 2013.
Early life and career
Jed McCaleb was born in 1975 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He attended the University of California but he was dropped out. So he decided to move to New York.
In 2000, McCaleb created eDonkey and kdrive, which was early Dropbox-like file storage system. It allowed the secure and decentralized transfer of files. The eDonkey Network was an early decentralized p2p file-sharing network. eDonkey pioneered multi-source downloads by introducing hashing to p2p file sharing, which enabled 1-to-many data sharing.
In 2007, Jed bought mtgox.com domain to create a trading website for Magic: the Gathering, both a collectible and digital collectible card game created by Richard Garfield. Later the idea was changed and the bitcoin exchange company was formed. In 2011, McCaleb sold the website to Mark Karpelès.
In 2011, McCaleb started developing a digital currency where transactions can be verified by consensus among network members. It was named Ripple protocol and differed a lot from bitcoin mining method. McCaleb founded the Ripple company and developed the cryptocurrency until he resigned in 2013.
In 2014, he co-founded the Stellar company. He created another cryptocurrency based on the Ripple protocol. Now McCaleb serves as CTO at Stellar.
In 2017, McCaleb created Lightyear.io, a commercial endeavor building on the Stellar network. It expands the role and popularity of Stellar.
Jed is also an advisor to MIRI. MIRI is a nonprofit organization that exists to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence has a positive impact.