Chris Larsen is the founder and early investor of Ripple Labs Inc. Ripple is a payment network for XRP digital currency. Chris is also active in executive management and angel investing, with a reputation for launching several technology startups in Silicon Valley. In this article, we will find out in detail who Chris Larsen is and why he is important to blockchain technology and digital currencies.
If you want to know “what is Ripple”, read its article on Wallex blog.
Who is Chris Larsen?
Chris Larsen was born in 1960 in the city of San Francisco in the state of California in the West Coast region of America. His father was a United Airlines mechanic at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and his mother was a graphic designer.
In 1984, Larsen graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in international business and accounting. He then continued his graduate studies at Stanford Business School and graduated with an MBA in 1991.
In 1996, Chris Larsen founded an online mortgage loan system called E-Loan, which was the first company to offer free FICO credit scores. But the most brilliant project in his career path was the establishment of Ripple Labs, which led to the development of Ripple. In fact, as the founder of Ripple, Chris created a software that allowed instant and direct money transfer between two parties.
You can read how the price of this digital currency is determined in the Ripple price article.
Chris Larsen’s projects and careers
In this section, we introduce the businesses started by Chris Larsen.
Chris Larsen’s projects, before entering the digital currency world
Chris Larsen began his career with the oil giant Chevron immediately after graduating with an undergraduate degree. He was responsible for conducting financial audits for the company’s operations in Asia and South America, focusing on Indonesia, Brazil and Ecuador. Around this time, Chris decided to go back to college and earn a master’s degree. In the following, we will introduce the projects he has done in this direction.
E-Loan: electronic loan
The story of the establishment of this business began when Chris Larsen started working for a mortgage in California in the early 1990s, until in 1996, he decided to focus on the development of E-Loan. In fact, E-Loan is a loan website that was launched with the aim of eliminating brokerage commissions and other fees.
The E-Loan website was publicly unveiled in 1997. The website allowed borrowers to search for and receive loans directly online without the fees charged by brokers and sales representatives.
The E-Loan project was very successful; So that it became one of the first online mortgage lenders in America. But in 1998, the company decided to start financing itself, and Larsen decided to step down.
But that same year, Larsen and his partner Pawlowski struck a deal with Yahoo CEO Timothy Kugel to buy a 23 percent stake in E-Loan for $25 million. Eventually, Larsen and Pawlowski were able to take control of E-Loan.
E-Loan became the first company in America to provide free FICO credit scores to applicants.
In 2000, the market value of E-Loan was estimated to be around 1 billion US dollars. Larsen left the company in 2005, just as it was sold to Banco Popular.
In the early 2000s, Larsen began financial privacy activism in California and was instrumental in the passage of the California Privacy Act in 2003.
Prosper market
Larsen resigned as the CEO of E-Loan in early 2005 to start his other project, Prosper Market.
The company began operating in the online auction market, where lenders and borrowers set loan rates using a system similar to Dutch auctions. By the end of 2008, Prosper had facilitated $271 million in peer-to-peer lending and received a total of $74.5 million from investment funds.
Projects based on digital currency technology
Chris Larsen has always stuck to his decision to remove the hierarchy of financial intermediaries to reduce transaction costs. So, both the E-Loan and Prosper markets reflect his decision.
OpenCoin
David Schwartz, Arthur Brito, and Jed McCaleb decided to create a better version of the network after examining Bitcoin, which would greatly improve the network’s shortcomings. So in 2011, they started developing the XRP ledger. Their goal was to create a digital asset that was more stable than Bitcoin and was created specifically for payment. As a result, the XRP ledger was established in 2012. Shortly after launching the XRP ledger, Chris Larsen joined the board and co-founded NewCoin. After a short time, the company changed its name to Opencoin and then to Ripple.
In fact, OpenCoin is a company that developed a payment protocol called Ripple to enable instant and direct peer-to-peer money transfers.
OpenCoin also developed its own digital currency so that financial institutions can transfer money with minimal fees and waiting time.
On May 14, 2013, OpenCoin announced that it had been funded, attracting Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, and IDG Capital Partners as investors.
Ripple Labs Inc
In September 2013, OpenCoin changed its name to Ripple Labs Inc. Another change he made was that Ripple’s payment network code was also open-sourced, and Larsen remained the company’s CEO.
In 2014, Ripple was the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after Bitcoin. MIT Technology Review named Ripple Labs as one of the top 50 companies in 2105. Also in the same year, it was selected as the fourth company in Fast Company’s list of 10 innovative financial companies in the world.
During an interview with Nielsen, Larsen said: “We don’t need a new currency. Rather, we need a better way to transfer existing currencies. Market makers see the use of a digital asset or digital currency as an efficient part of their business, if this digital currency is allowed to be exchanged for anything of value that Bitcoin does not allow. That’s why we created Ripple to be able to trade it in dollars, euros, yen and many other currencies. “As you can see, Ripple (XRP) has become a global bridge for exchanging anything of value, and market makers use it to make markets.”
In February 2018, Chris Larsen became the fifth richest person in the world on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires.
According to the New York Times, on January 4, 2108, his fortune was about 59 billion dollars, which made him surpass Mark Zuckerberg. But this position was purely temporary, as much of Larsen’s wealth is virtual.
Finally, in 2020, Chris Larsen was ranked 319 in the list of 400 richest Americans.
How much is Chris Larsen’s property?
As of November 2016, Chris Larsen, the founder and CEO of Ripple, has more than 5.1 billion XRP, according to Forbes. In addition, 17% of Ripple’s shares also belong to him.
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