Jed McCaleb — the programmer who helped create Ripple and later founded Stellar — is redirecting a huge chunk of his crypto-era wealth into artificial intelligence. In a recent Forbes interview, McCaleb said he plans to funnel roughly $1 billion from his XRP-derived fortune (previously estimated at about $3.9 billion) into building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) modeled on the human brain.
The funding will flow through the Astera Institute, a California-based nonprofit McCaleb founded that has been shifting toward neuroscience-inspired AI research. In addition to the $1 billion earmarked for the core AGI effort, McCaleb says he will commit another $600 million specifically to neuroscience studies. The institute’s approach is to use biological data as a blueprint — recording neural activity via brain-computer interfaces in animals such as mice as they perform everyday tasks (like navigating mazes) — and then use those insights to design novel AI architectures that go beyond today’s dominant transformer models.
McCaleb is openly skeptical of mainstream AI methods. He told Forbes that while transformer models excel at prediction tasks, they fall short in long-term planning, decision-making and setting internal goals. He believes a brain-inspired framework could produce systems that are both more capable and easier for humans to understand and control — a step toward safer AGI. “AI is going to be the most transformative thing that humans ever create,” he said.
This isn’t McCaleb’s first billion-dollar bet outside crypto: he previously committed about $1 billion to build a private space station slated for 2025. And although his early work in crypto made his fortune — he was a founder of OpenCoin (which evolved into Ripple), helped develop the XRP Ledger, and received an early personal allocation of roughly 9 billion XRP (about 9% of the total supply) — McCaleb eventually left Ripple and sold off his XRP by 2022. He describes his time in cryptocurrency as “a big detour” from a long-standing interest in AI.
A quick look back: McCaleb’s roots in crypto go through some of the industry’s formative projects. He came into the space as a developer with experience running Mt. Gox, and in 2011 began work on what became the Ripple protocol, recruiting contributors such as former Ripple CTO David Schwartz. Those early XRP allocations helped build the capital that McCaleb is now redirecting into biotech- and neuroscience-driven AI research.
Why it matters: Major private funding aimed at neuroscience-informed AI could push research away from purely data-driven, scale-first approaches and toward hybrid systems inspired by biological brains. For the crypto community, McCaleb’s shift is also a sign of where some crypto-era wealth is moving — into longer-term scientific bets that could reshape not only tech but broader society.
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