RippleNet's General Manager Is Stepping Down

Asheesh Birla, general manager of RippleNet, has taken to Twitter to announce his decision to quit his day job at Ripple.

While Birla is yet to decide on his next career move, he will now sit on Ripple's Board of Directors together with former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios and JPMorgan veteran Sandie O'Connor.

Monica Long, another long-time executive, will now lead both RippleNet and RippleX, according to CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

Garlinghouse praised Birla for having an "incredible" impact on the company.

Birla joined the San Francisco-based company back in 2013. As a member of the company's founding team, he was responsible for developing blockchain-powered cross-border payment solutions.

As reported by U.Today, the long-timer Rippler took the helm of RippleNet, an international payments platform for banking institutions and money services. Birla joined Ripple when it was still a small start-up. Back then, crypto was still a novel concept. The now-defunct Mt. Gox exchange, which was the market leader back then, was processing only $2 million worth of transactions per day. The entire crypto market cap was just $1.6 billion, a drop in the bucket compared to today's $1.3 trillion. Payment company Stripe attempted to acquire Ripple back in 2013, but the deal fell through.

Birla described the launch of the On-Demand Liquidity solution (formerly known as xRapid) as a "huge milestone" for the company. The product allows instantly settling fiat payments by using XRP as a bridge currency.

In 2021, the RippletNet network managed to reach $1 billion in monthly volume despite facing a lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.