Monica Long: The Steady Force Building Ripple from the Inside
President of Ripple since 2023 and an employee since 2013 — Monica Long is the quiet operator who built Ripple from the inside through every cycle.
In the public story of Ripple and XRP, certain names dominate the headlines — the founders, the CEO, the courtroom advocates. Quieter, but no less important, is the executive who has been inside the company almost from the beginning and steadily risen to one of its highest roles: Monica Long, President of Ripple.
Since joining in 2013 as one of the earliest employees, Long has helped shape how Ripple communicates, builds products, supports developers, and grows its payments business. In January 2023 she was named President, overseeing key business units including Ripple’s payments network and the developer-focused RippleX organization. In an industry known for rapid turnover and loud personalities, her long tenure and measured style stand out.
From Early Days to the Executive Suite
Monica Long arrived at Ripple (then a very small company) as Director of Communications when the team numbered roughly ten people. She came from a background in corporate communications and public relations, including time at Intuit and work with fintech startups. One of those earlier connections was with Chris Larsen through the peer-to-peer lending platform Prosper — a relationship that later helped bring her into the Ripple orbit.
Over the following decade she moved through successive leadership roles: building out marketing and communications, serving as Senior Vice President of Marketing and Design, then becoming General Manager of RippleX (the group supporting the open-source XRP Ledger developer community). She later added responsibility for RippleNet and On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), the product that uses XRP to source liquidity for cross-border payments in real time. Her promotion to President recognized both her institutional knowledge and her track record of execution across multiple parts of the business.
She holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been recognized among influential women in Bay Area business.
A Builder Through Cycles
What makes Long’s story particularly relevant to the XRP community is that she has lived through the full arc inside the company. She was there in the early experimental years, through the growth phase, through multiple crypto winters, and through the long and difficult SEC litigation. While others came and went, she remained and kept advancing.
Colleagues and public comments often describe her as focused on trust, clarity, and practical progress rather than hype. As General Manager of RippleX she oversaw efforts to grow the developer ecosystem — grants, accelerators, hackathons, and tooling that helped expand what could be built on the XRP Ledger. On the payments side, she played a central role as ODL moved from concept toward real institutional usage.
In her own words when she became President, she spoke about the original mission that drew her in: the idea of an Internet of Value that could move money as easily as information. That continuity of belief, paired with operational responsibility, defines much of her public profile.
Leadership Style and Broader Role
Long is not the most omnipresent executive on social media, but when she speaks it tends to be substantive — about product direction, institutional adoption, the evolving role of stablecoins and tokenization, or the infrastructure needed for emerging technologies such as AI agents. She has also served as Executive Sponsor of the Women at Ripple employee resource group, reflecting an interest in building more inclusive pathways inside the industry.
Her career path itself is notable. She did not enter as a pure technologist or trader. She entered through communications and marketing, then expanded into general management of both developer and enterprise product organizations. That progression — from shaping the narrative to owning major lines of business — is relatively uncommon and gives her a wide-angle view of the company.
Why She Matters in the XRP Story
Every successful technology company needs both visionaries and operators. Ripple has had prominent founders and a visible CEO. It has also needed people who could turn ambition into functioning products, growing teams, and durable relationships with financial institutions and developers. Monica Long has spent more than a decade doing exactly that work from inside the organization.
For the XRP community, her presence represents continuity and institutional memory. She joined when the company was still finding its footing and stayed through periods when the external environment was hostile or uncertain. The fact that she now sits as President is a signal of how much the company values that combination of loyalty, range, and execution.
In any serious collection of people who have shaped the modern XRP and Ripple story, Monica Long belongs near the center — not as the loudest voice, but as one of the most consistent and consequential builders of the business itself.
Profile based on publicly reported information about Monica Long and Ripple, current as of 2026. Terminalcraft is a news and information service — not financial advice. Always do your own research.