‘Crypto Was Just Beginning’: Ripple Founder Jed McCaleb Reveals Ultimate Destination

Ripple and Stellar founder Jed McCaleb has highlighted that crypto might be the beginning of his tech journey, revealing an ultimate destination.  

McCaleb revealed a lifelong passion aside from crypto: AI. The Ripple cofounder disclosed that he had been wanting to work on AI the whole time.

According to Forbes, McCaleb wants to build AGI by studying how the brain learns and then translate the rules into AI. Beyond this, the Stellar founder is also trying to bankroll it to reality.

“Crypto was, in some sense, a big detour,” McCaleb stated. He had “been wanting to work on AI the whole time.” He added that the only time he really got the chance to pursue this was once he stepped back from crypto. McCaleb believes in AI’s transformative potential, saying that it is the most compelling thing to work on.

McCaleb stated that “AI is going to be the most transformative thing that humans ever create. So it’s the most compelling thing to work on.”

In this light, McCaleb is committing $1 billion of his cryptocurrency fortune (worth about $3.9 billion by Forbes’s estimate) to building AI systems that achieve artificial general intelligence, which refers to the threshold at which AI systems can perform tasks as well as humans.

McCaleb’s crypto journey

McCaleb’s foray into cryptocurrency goes way beyond 2011, when he teamed up with XRP Ledger creators David Schwartz and Arthur Britto to begin developing XRPL.

Fascinated by Bitcoin, the trio set out to create a better version that improved upon its limitations, with the goal of creating a digital asset that was more sustainable and built specifically for payments. The XRP Ledger was launched shortly after, in June 2012.

McCaleb left Ripple in 2013 due to differing visions with the company, and he later cofounded the Stellar (XLM) network.

As one of Ripple’s cofounders, McCaleb was allocated a total of nine billion XRP in 2012. In 2014, McCaleb reached an agreement with Ripple to gradually sell his XRP holdings. He fully liquidated his XRP holdings in 2022.