Jed McCaleb

Last updated
Jed McCaleb
Born (1975-06-08) June 8, 1975 (age 48)
Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley
Occupation Software developer
Known for eDonkey, Mt. Gox, Ripple, Stellar
Title CTO of Stellar
Website jedmccaleb.com

Jed McCaleb is an American programmer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is the founder and CEO of aerospace startup Vast [1] and a co-founder and the CTO of Stellar. [2] Prior to co-founding Stellar, McCaleb founded and served as the CTO of the company Ripple until 2013. McCaleb is also known for creating the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, and the peer-to-peer eDonkey and Overnet networks as well as the eDonkey2000 application.

Contents

As of March 2023, McCaleb is worth US$2.4 billion according to Forbes ' Billionaires List. [3]

Early life and education

McCaleb was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and attended the University of California, Berkeley. [4] He eventually dropped out and moved to New York City. [5]

Career

In 2000, McCaleb founded MetaMachine Inc. and released his eDonkey2000 application. [6] Sam Yagan joined him in 2001 and served as CEO of the company. [7] McCaleb served as the CTO of the company and continued to develop the peer-to-peer eDonkey network as well as the Overnet network and the eDonkey2000 application. [8] At its height, the network grew to have over 4 million active users at any given time. [9] In September 2006, the company reached a settlement with the RIAA and agreed that the company and its top executives would "immediately cease distributing eDonkey, eDonkey2000, Overnet and other software versions" and the company would pay $30 million to the RIAA to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits. [10]

In 2007, he purchased the domain Mtgox.com with the intent to create a trading site for Magic: The Gathering cards. After moving on from his original idea, McCaleb repurposed the site in late 2010 as a bitcoin exchange that could process bitcoin-to-dollar trades. The website grew in popularity within months. [11] McCaleb sold the company to Mark Karpelès in February 2011 and remained a minority owner in the company until its collapse in 2014. [12] [13]

In 2011, McCaleb began developing a digital currency in which transactions were verified by consensus among network members which became known as the Ripple protocol, which differs from the mining technique used in bitcoin. [14] He recruited David Schwartz and secured an investment from Jesse Powell before adding Arthur Britto as the chief strategist. McCaleb recruited Chris Larsen to be CEO of the new company, which became known as Opencoin. He continued development of the Ripple protocol and its currency while securing investments [15] before McCaleb left his active role with the company in July 2013. [11]

In 2014, he co-founded the non-profit organization the Stellar Development Foundation with Joyce Kim [16] to develop the Stellar open source protocol to allow cross-border monetary transactions including fiat and digital currencies. [17] [18] The organization debuted on July 31, 2014, and received $3 million loan from the technology company Stripe. [19] The organization originally based its payment network on the Ripple protocol McCaleb previously developed, but in 2015 adopted the Stellar Consensus Protocol. [20] McCaleb serves as chief technology officer of Stellar. [21]

In May 2017, McCaleb also launched Lightyear.io, a commercial endeavor building on the Stellar network. Lightyear facilitates Stellar, becoming a global payment and currency exchange initially directed at the developing world. [22] In October 2017, Lightyear partnered with IBM to launch blockchain banking in the South Pacific using Stellar's lumen currency. [23] In September 2018, McCaleb negotiated the merger of Lightyear and Chain.com, creating the new merged entity named InterStellar. [24]

The New York Times named McCaleb one of the top 10 people leading the blockchain revolution in 2018. [25]

In 2021, McCaleb founded aerospace company Vast. Vast's announced mission is to develop artificial gravity space stations. As of 2023, McCaleb is Vast's CEO and sole funder. [26] [27] [1]

Philanthropy

McCaleb donated US$500,000 worth of XRP (at the time of donation) to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and remains one of its largest donors, [28] as well as joining its advisory board. [29] In February 2018, McCaleb was announced as a new donor to the artificial intelligence research group OpenAI. [30]

Related Research Articles

eDonkey2000

eDonkey2000 is a former peer-to-peer file sharing application developed by US company MetaMachine, using the Multisource File Transfer Protocol. It supported both the eDonkey2000 network and the Overnet network.

A cryptocurrency exchange, or a digital currency exchange (DCE), is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments, wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency exchange can be a market maker that typically takes the bid–ask spreads as a transaction commission for its service or, as a matching platform, simply charges fees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitcoin</span> Decentralized digital currency

Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Nodes in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network verify transactions through cryptography and record them in a public distributed ledger, called a blockchain, without central oversight. Consensus between nodes is achieved using a computationally intensive process based on proof of work, called mining, that requires increasing quantities of electricity and guarantees the security of the bitcoin blockchain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryptocurrency</span> Digital currency not reliant on a central authority

A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.

Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network that is open to financial institutions worldwide and was created by Ripple Labs Inc., a US-based technology company. Released in 2012, Ripple is built upon a distributed open source protocol, and supports tokens representing fiat currency, cryptocurrency, commodities, or other units of value such as frequent flier miles or mobile minutes. Ripple purports to enable "secure, instantly and nearly free global financial transactions of any size with no chargebacks". The ledger employs the native cryptocurrency known as XRP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mt. Gox</span> Defunct Bitcoin exchange based in Japan

Mt. Gox was a bitcoin exchange based in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Launched in 2010, it was handling over 70% of all bitcoin (BTC) buys/sells worldwide by early 2014, when it abruptly ceased operations amid revelations of its involvement in the loss/theft of hundreds of thousands of bitcoins, then worth hundreds of millions in US dollars.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitstamp</span> Bitcoin exchange based in the UK

Bitstamp is a European cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2011. It is the world’s longest-running cryptocurrency exchange. It allows trading between fiat currency, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, such as USD, EUR, GBP, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Algorand, Stellar, and USD Coin. Business operations are conducted from its registered headquarters in Luxembourg City, with a satellite office in Ljubljana.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of bitcoin</span> Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. Originally designed as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.

Ripple Labs, Inc. is an American technology company which develops the Ripple payment protocol and exchange network. Originally named Opencoin and renamed in 2015, the company was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dash (cryptocurrency)</span> Cryptocurrency

Dash is an open source cryptocurrency. It is an altcoin that was forked from the Bitcoin protocol. It is also a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) run by a subset of its users, which are called "masternodes".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stellar (payment network)</span> Cryptocurrency

Stellar, or Stellar Lumens, is an open-source, decentralized protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delaware nonprofit corporation, the Stellar Development Foundation, though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.

A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain, with each additional block linking to the ones before it. Consequently, blockchain transactions are irreversible in that, once they are recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks.

CoinDesk is a news site specializing in bitcoin and digital currencies. Founded by Shakil Khan, the firm also provides guides to bitcoin for those new to digital currencies.

Monero is a cryptocurrency which uses a blockchain with privacy-enhancing technologies to obfuscate transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading Monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories.

A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or an online service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet more often offers the functionality of encrypting and/or signing information. Signing can for example result in executing a smart contract, a cryptocurrency transaction, identification, or legally signing a 'document'.

Cryptocurrency and crime describe notable examples of cybercrime related to theft of cryptocurrencies and some methods or security vulnerabilities commonly exploited. Cryptojacking is a form of cybercrime specific to cryptocurrencies that have been used on websites to hijack a victim's resources and use them for hashing and mining cryptocurrency.

bitFlyer is a private company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan and founded in 2014. It operates one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges with 2.5 million users and develops other crypto-related technology.

The transaction malleability problem is a vulnerability in blockchain which can be exploited by altering a cryptographic hash, such as the digital signature used to identify a cryptocurrency transaction. Transaction malleability is considered to be one of the largest ongoing threats to blockchain technology, as it can compromise financial transactions such as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transactions, and cause other issues in the network.

Chainalysis is an American blockchain analysis firm headquartered in New York City. The company was co-founded by Michael Gronager, Jan Møller and Jonathan Levin in 2014, and is the first start-up company dedicated to the business of Bitcoin tracing. It offers compliance and investigation software to analyze the blockchain public ledger, which is primarily used to track virtual currencies. Next to banks and brokers its customers have included the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, as well as the United Kingdom's National Crime Agency.

References

  1. 1 2 "Vast Space Becomes the Newest Member of "Space Beach"". BusinessWire. 2023-01-10. Retrieved 2023-04-06.
  2. ↑ Cheng, Evelyn (March 21, 2018). "An early bitcoin pioneer predicts how the blockchain will change banking". CNBC . Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  3. ↑ "Forbes" . Retrieved March 7, 2023.
  4. ↑ McMillan, Robert (September 30, 2013). "Bitcoin Maverick Returns for New Crack at Digital Currency". Wired. Retrieved May 5, 2018.
  5. ↑ "The Death of Bitcoin's Mt. Gox".
  6. ↑ McCarthy, Caroline (September 27, 2006). "File-sharing site eDonkey kicks it". CNET . Retrieved May 5, 2018.
  7. ↑ Helm, Burt (October 24, 2005). "A Hard Ride For eDonkey". Bloomberg. Retrieved May 5, 2018.
  8. ↑ Dumez, Christophe (2003-01-29). "Nouveau client officiel eDonkey et interview". Tom's Hardware (in French). Archived from the original on December 4, 2017. Retrieved May 5, 2018.
  9. ↑ Cullen, Drew (September 13, 2006). "RIAA drops the dead eDonkey". The Register. Retrieved May 5, 2018.
  10. ↑ "EDonkey File-Sharing Network Is Shut Down". Los Angeles Times. September 13, 2006. Retrieved May 5, 2018.
  11. 1 2 McMillan, Robert (September 30, 2013). "Bitcoin Maverick Returns For New Crack at Digital Currency". Wired. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
  12. ↑ Farivar, Cyrus (May 1, 2014). "Original Mt. Gox founder: "I lost around $50,000" in site's collapse". Ars Technica. Retrieved May 5, 2018.
  13. ↑ McMillan, Robert (March 3, 2014). "The Inside Story of Mt. Gox, Bitcoin's $460 Million Disaster". Wired. Retrieved May 5, 2018.
  14. ↑ Reutzel, Bailey (December 7, 2002). "Disruptor Chris Larsen Returns With a Bitcoin-Like Payments System". PaymentsSource. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
  15. ↑ Empson, Rip (April 11, 2013). "Now Backed by Andreessen & More, OpenCoin Looks to Build a Better Bitcoin - And a Universal Payment Ecosystem". TechCrunch. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
  16. ↑ Shu, Catherine (October 19, 2017). "Led by Stellar Cofounder Joyce Kim, SparkChain Capital is a New $100M Fund for Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Startups". TechCrunch. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
  17. ↑ Hackett, Robert (December 6, 2017). "Stripe-Backed Stellar Kicks Off Worldwide Money Transfers". Fortune. Retrieved May 5, 2018.
  18. ↑ Brown, Mike (January 2, 2018). "As Ripple Surges, Why STellar Could Be the Next Cryptocurrency to Go Huge". Inverse Innovation. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
  19. ↑ del Castillo, Michael (August 1, 2014). "Mt. Gox Founder Raises Unconventional $3M 'Investment' For His All-Star Bitcoin Startup". The Business Journals. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
  20. ↑ Simonite, Tom (April 15, 2015). "A New Competitor For Bitcoin Aims to be Faster and Safer". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
  21. ↑ Hochstein, Marc; Yurcan, Bryan (May 11, 2017). "This cryptocurrency project is now courting banks". American Banker. Retrieved 2018-03-20.
  22. ↑ Roberts, Jeff John (May 11, 2017). "Stripe-Backed Stellar Places a Bet on Blockchain in the Developing World". Fortune. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
  23. ↑ Roberst, Jeff John (October 16, 2017). "IBM and Stellar Are Launching Blockchain Banking ACross Multiple Countries". Fortune. Archived from the original on 16 October 2017. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
  24. ↑ Chavez-Dreyfuss, Gertrude. "Lightyear buys U.S. blockchain start-up Chain; to move business to..." U.S. Retrieved 2018-10-19.
  25. ↑ Popper, Nathaniel (June 27, 2018). "The People Leading the Blockchain Revolution". The New York Times. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  26. ↑ Foust, Jeff (21 February 2023). "Vast acquires Launcher to support space station development". SpaceNews. Retrieved 6 April 2023.
  27. ↑ Alamalhodaei, Aria (21 February 2023). "Vast acquires Launcher in quest to build artificial gravity space stations". TechCrunch. Retrieved 6 April 2023.
  28. ↑ McBain, Sophie (25 September 2014). "Apocalypse soon: the scientists preparing for the end times". New Statesman. Retrieved 2019-07-01.
  29. ↑ Rosenberger, Patrick (2018). Bitcoin und Blockchain: Vom Scheitern einer Ideologie und dem Erfolg einer revolutionären Technik. Berlin: Springer Vieweg. p. 42. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-56088-4. ISBN   978-3-662-56087-7.
  30. ↑ Bell, Lee (February 28, 2018). "Elon Musk is leaving board of OpenAI due to Tesla conflict". The Inquirer. Archived from the original on February 22, 2018. Retrieved May 5, 2018.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
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