Well isn’t it obvious, they’re getting sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission? No, I actually don’t see that greatly impacting Ripple’s long term prospects and am quite bullish on the company as a whole. A significant majority of XRP volume happens outside of the United States and Ripple has such a massive war chest that they can easily fund innovation for years to come while they deal with the unclear regulatory framework of the United States on the side. On top of that, XRP’s market cap has nearly doubled since the S.E.C. announcement.
How I Got Involved In The First Place
After completing my internship at Microsoft, it became quite clear that I had no desire to join a massive tech company and building a startup was the right path for me. I spent a majority of my senior year at Harvard working to make this possible. As with all startups, mine had a tumultuous beginning. From skipping classes for weeks at a time because I was in South Korea trying to develop relationships with exchanges so we could arbitrage Bitcoin, to sleeping in the trunk of a car in the Mojave Desert because we were supposed to meet a potential investor at a camp site that was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, we were able to wrap up a round of funding at the end of our senior year and could move forward confidently with nearly a million dollars in the bank. While I wasn’t in Korea or in the trunk of a car, I was at cryptography and blockchain conferences. Through these we learned of the Interledger Protocol (ILP). The idea was a decentralized payments network where payments moved like packets of data on the internet today. Using this powerful system we were able to provide new use cases for payments like micropayments and cross currency payments. After demonstrating the promise of this network in terms of throughput (exceeding 3,000 transactions per second) and volume (greater than 10 billion transactions in a year) Ripple acquired my first company Strata Labs, Inc. at the end of 2019.
My Time At Ripple
I was initially drawn to Interledger because I believed in a future where we would have a plethora of various blockchains, each with competitive advantages in their own niche. I wanted to help build technology that united these independent ecosystems to present a unified challenge to the traditional financial system. The opportunity to continue this work at Ripple presented itself in the form of PayString, a similarly unifying protocol that I had the opportunity to coauthor with Ripple’s CTO David Schwartz. I had a great deal of freedom at Ripple and many opportunities to build new technologies, but at the end of the day there is a cap to the career growth you can experience as an employee at an established company. Meanwhile, an ecosystem of fascinating new financial applications dubbed “DeFi" (decentralized finance) began to flourish, drawing in tens of billions of dollars and presenting new use cases for crypto assets. Feeling a desire to build something from the ground up with a small team again and seeing all of these brilliant innovations: I quit.
What Now?
When I first got involved in crypto the technology was rather immature. Blockchains were slow, they lacked use cases and mostly prospered off of speculation. Today there is further mainstream adoption, a nuanced ecosystem of application, and exciting scaling challenges with solutions on the horizon. I plan to be researching DeFi full time with the intent to eventually build another company. I believe deeply in a future of financial freedom and privacy, I believe we deserve an internet of value. If you are interested in DeFi, cryptocurrency, or the evolution of our modern financial systems you can follow along in my journey through this newsletter where I will be consolidating my learnings.
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