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| Place of birth | Arkansas, U.S. |
| Place of residence | San Francisco, U.S. |
| Category | Founders, Developers |
| Known for | Founding Mt. Gox, Ripple, and Stellar |
Biography:
Jed McCaleb has been an active builder of P2P technologies since 2000, when he created the P2P file-sharing network eDonkey. He founded his first digital currency venture, the Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange, before selling the company to Mark Karpeles in 2011. In that same year, he founded Ripple, where he served as chief technical officer until 2013. He is now leading the development of the Stellar cryptocurrency network. The New York Times reported that at one point, McCaleb was worth $20 billion in XRP tokens alone, making him one of the richest players in the industry.
Jed McCaleb's 2019:
2019 marked a significant shift and reprioritization in the Stellar network's development. In May, the network went offline for an hour following a brief consensus failure on the network. While the protocol is designed to prioritize safety over liveness — i.e., shut down rather than be compromised by malicious actors — the team has since upgraded the protocol to be more resilient in such events.
In September, the Stellar Development Foundation launched a $120 million airdrop of 2 billion Lumens (XLM) to users of Keybase, an encrypted messenger service. In November, the SDF announced that it would burn 55 billion XLM and cease the airdrop programs, citing a need to implement a more proactive business strategy to spur development and adoption of the Stellar ecosystem.
What Cointelegraph expects for 2020:
The Stellar Development Foundation is proceeding forward with a leaner organizational mindset and a more robust growth plan for the Stellar network and Lumens token. With the SDF having burned a significant portion of the foundation's token supply and restructured the accounts for various funds for ecosystem growth, enterprise development, use-case adoption, strategic partnerships, and others, we expect the team will proceed into the new year with a renewed focus on its technical and business fronts in an effort to compete within the rapidly growing crypto asset and distributed ledger space.