Stellar is the #24 largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $7.5 Billion. Stellar Lumens was founded in June 2014 by Jed McCaleb. Let's learn more about Jed McCaleb.
Jed McCaleb was born in 1975 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and attended the University of California at Berkeley and studied Computer Science. At Berkeley, Jed created MetaMachine and dropped out to pursue it full-time. MetaMachine created eDonkey2000 and kdrive (an early Dropbox-like file storage system that allowed for the secure transfer of files in a decentralized manner). 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. eDonkey was the first implementation of a large-scale DHT. In September 2006, the company settled with the RIAA and agreed that its top executives would "immediately cease distributing eDonkey, eDonkey2000.
In 2007, he purchased the domain Mtgox.com 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. McCaleb sold the company to Mark Karpelès in February 2011 and remained a minority owner in the company until its collapse in 2014.
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. 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 developing the Ripple protocol and its currency while securing investments before McCaleb left his active role with the company in July 2013.
In 2014, he co-founded the non-profit organization the 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 received a $3 million loan from Stripe's technology company. The organization originally based its payment network on the Ripple protocol McCaleb previously developed but in 2015 adopted the Stellar Consensus Protocol. McCaleb serves as chief technology officer of Stellar.
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. In October 2017, Lightyear partnered with IBM to launch blockchain banking using Stellar's lumen currency in the South Pacific. In September 2018, McCaleb negotiated the merger of Lightyear and Chain.com, creating the newly merged entity named InterStellar.