PayPal’s Cofounder Is Supporting A New Non-Profit That Will Tackle The Vision PayPal ‘Never Accomplished’

PayPal cofounder Keith Rabois

PayPal cofounder and Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois is one of the many big names supporting a new, open-source non-profit called Stellar.

Stellar is a decentralized protocol that will let users send and receive money between any pair of currencies (meaning, for example, you could send money in dollars and have it arrive to someone else in Euros).

The startup will use a Bitcoin-like virtual currency called “stellar,” to provide the conversion path between all the currencies.

The platform will also allow users to make standard payments too, without needing to integrate stellars. The network has an initial supply of 100 billion stellars, and the company described how it plans to split that currency:

    •    50% of the total will be distributed to people who sign up for an account.

    •    25% will be distributed by other nonprofits focused on financial inclusion.

    •    20% will be given to current Bitcoin and Ripple holders—two systems that Stellar owes a lot to.

Stellar has big ambitions. According to Rabois, it will tackle problems that PayPal never did:

There are a bunch of other big names on board, including Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, YCombinator president Sam Altman, Mt. Gox creator Jed McCaleb, AngelList cofounder and CEO Naval Ravikant, cofounder of Dogecoin Jackson Palmer, and Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, among others. Stripe provided $3 million funding to get the startup off the ground. 

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