The world of Banking has been almost upside down since the introduction of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology cut down the intermediary costs and the transaction time for banks to seconds with a much bigger implication in the world of decentralized finance.
Now, you may ask and you must do that What the heck is decentralized finance now?
Well, to answer this question effectively and easily in order to make an average person understand, Decentralised finance is that branch of cryptocurrency and blockchain that deals with all kinds of financial instruments in a decentralized manner and by using the underlying blockchain technology to perform the transactions and maintaining the ledger.
For example, the world of finance does not just limit to money and currency, but also spreads in the form of insurance, loans, savings accounts, etc and cutting out the mediators in between cuts out the cost a lot and all this can be achieved using the blockchain technology in the field of finance.
Many banks on a global scale have introduced blockchain technology to perform daily transactions which is a massive amount in itself and Decentralized finance or “Defi” as a concept is in its infancy and we have just started exploring the possibilities which is just the tip of the iceberg.
Today, we are here to talk about a person who envisioned and is currently running the world of Decentralised finance with the circulation of Ripple. Although Ripple or XRP is not completely decentralized, it still uses blockchain as the underlying technology behind most of the innovations coming from the Ripple labs.
Today we will be talking about the present mastermind behind Ripple Labs, Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple Labs, and we will also try to have a deeper look at his early life and achievements and most definitely the meat of the article the total “Net worth” of his holdings all in all. Let us now deep dive starting with a proper introduction.
Introduction
Brad Garlinghouse (Full name: Bradley Kent Garlinghouse) was born in February 1971 in the Topeka city of Kansas, The United States, and is famously known for his position as CEO in the Ripple Labs, an American tech company that developed the Ripple payment protocol with the use of XRP as the running token for the transactions. Ripple labs with the use of blockchain technology and a centralized approach are stirring the banking and Defi space bringing in a revolution for the banking sector with exceptionally low transaction fees and a sustainable model of business.
Ripple Labs was founded in the year 2012 and was previously known as Open coin and was renamed Ripple Labs in the year of 2015.
Education and Career
There is not much reliable information available at his early education experiences, but according to some of the sources on the Internet, Brad studied and graduated acquiring a bachelorette degree in Arts specializing in Economics and soon after became a student of the MBA program of Harvard school of business in the year of 1997 which is also mentioned in his LinkedIn profile.
It was not from the early start that he began his carrier with Ripple as a CEO, but he had to climb quite a steep ladder in his professional life to reach where he is now. At first right into starting his career in 1997, he started working as a bus dev and General partner at home network and Ventures consecutively.
In the year 2000, he transitioned and joined as the CEO of Dialpad, a company specializing in VOIP services and computer to computer calling services.
In the year 2003, Brad Garlinghouse joined Yahoo! As the SVP communications and Front Doors, Handling most of the yahoo services including yahoo mail, messenger, photos, voice, and also the yahoo homepage. He was the one to pen down the famous and successful peanut butter manifesto as the business model, which stated that the company should focus on quality and not “Spread thin” just like peanut butter does.
In the year of 2009 after working at Yahoo! for almost around six years Brad resigned and joined Silver lake, a global tech investment firm, which collectively generates more than 180 billion US dollars in annual revenue and produces more than 40k employment opportunities.
He stayed in the company for less than a year.
Moving on to AOL, A market leader in internet content distribution and advertising through its own platforms like the Huffington post, tech crunch, etc. Brad joined in September 2009 as the president of applications and commerce in the company.
On leaving AOL almost after working for 2.5 years Brad joined as the CEO of “Yousendit” now known as Hightail corporation, a company focusing on the creative collaboration measures and solutions making it easier for the creative professionals to work collaboratively and share every creative file type through the platform.
It is funny that almost after more than 700 words we have just reached halfway of Brad’s whole career spread, without wasting any more time and words let us get going and look at some more of his achievements and career choices.
From the year 2013 to 2017 he was on the list of board members for different successful organizations from different genres like Ancestry.com, Tonic Health, and Animoto.
Finally, in the year 2015, He was appointed as the President and COO of Ripple Labs formerly known as Opencoin and after two consecutive years of great performance and huge innovations, Brad was promoted as the CEO of Ripple Labs in the year of 2017.
On the flipside, after Garlinghouse’s arrival in the company Ripple labs has also been in the news for some negative reasons like some security and laws breaches and for also spreading misinformation about its competitors like SWIFT.
Net worth
Brad Garlinghouse is one of the richest among the top 50 richest people of America holding a total net worth of around 10 million US dollars and almost around 7 percent stake in the company Ripple labs.
