Ripple has new CTO, biz dev director

Ripple announced a couple of additions to its leadership team on Wednesday.

First, it went in-house to replace former CTO Stefan Thomas. In a blog post today, CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced that David Schwartz, the crypto-financial company’s chief cryptographer, will take on the C-suite role. Schwartz is an influential member of the crypto community for some time. His Twitter account, @JoelKatz, has 103,000 followers.

In May, Thomas left the company after half a decade to start a Coil, a micropayments platform for content. At Ripple, he created its first client application and its platform for smart contracts. Coil is built on the XRP Ledger.

Notably, Garlinghouse’s statement said:

“Schwartz’s team will also be responsible for contributing to the further decentralization of the XRP Ledger — an ongoing process that started at the Ledger’s inception and continues to be an important focus across the XRP community.”

Ripple has been criticized by some who argue its XRP ledger isn’t decentralized and isn’t similar to other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether.

The company also poached Kahina Van Dyke from Facebook, where she was global director of financial services and payments partnerships. She will now serve as Ripple’s senior vice president for business and corporate development. Van Dyke is a veteran of MasterCard, where she spent seven years and has experience in emerging markets and remittance products.