Let’s build a new Internet (with Value)

Leaving Ripple, joining Coil and continuing the vision

About 3.5 years ago I was on a Skype call with two guys who I’ve since come to call good friends and, as it turned out following the call, colleagues.

Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz had just started kicking around this idea for a new payments protocol, at the time called five-bells, and they had decided they wanted to establish it as an open global standard.

I, on the other hand, had been spending my spare time participating in a number of open standards groups that were looking at payments, including one at W3C which Ripple had just joined. It’s on that group’s mailing list that I met Evan, and so, what would eventually become the Research Team at Ripple, went from 2 to 3.

Stefan and Evan worked on putting their ideas on paper, eventually published as the Interledger white-paper, and I kicked-off the process of building a community around this revolutionary idea.

We have worked tirelessly on improving and refining the protocol, debating literally hundreds of design issues, from the correct way to encode amounts, to the right place to put different data elements in our protocol stack. During this time both the Research Team at Ripple, and the Interledger Community, grew (to 13 and over 300 participants respectively) bringing new voices to the debate and new input to the architecture.

We’ve gone from Interledger v1 (as described in the white-paper) to the latest v4, summarized on the website (with a few failed experiments in-between) and a protocol that we believe is “done”.

In the last few weeks Evan has put the final touches on what I think will be one of his greatest pieces of work, the QUIC-inspired STREAM protocol and Ben Sharafian, Nathan Lie and, Andros Wong have posted blogs about the work they’ve been doing on Web Monetization, moneyd, Web Payments and even ILP-based Quake death-matches. Clearly the focus has moved from the core protocol onto higher layers in the stack, and applying Interledger to these new and exciting use cases.

And so, Stefan’s announcement earlier today, that he is starting his own company to focus on building out these use cases, probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Coil (the new company) is continuing the vision that we’ve shared with many of you over the last few years, of value traversing the globe as fast and as frictionlessly as information does on the Internet today.

While I feel genuinely heart-sore to be leaving Ripple after 3 incredible years, I am excited to be taking up a role at Coil to lead the build-out of this new open, global network. As one Ripple colleague said to me today, I’m leaving Ripple but at least I’m “staying in the family”.

We have an inspiring founding team at Coil and I’m confident you’ll be wowed by some incredible products in the next few months. My job will be to ensure our team and partners have the backbone network they need to take those products global and scale them up to “trillions of transactions a second” (to quote Stefan.

I look forward to the challenge and hope you’ll join us on the journey. If you are ready to be an Interledger pioneer let me know how I can help you. Lot’s more to come over the next few weeks and months!