Ripple's lead engineer leaves the company after nearly a decade with the company

Nik Bougalis has primarily worked on open source code projects for the payments-focused XRP ledger, the recent push to introduce NFTs being a key implementation to note.

Ripple Labs Director of Engineering Nik Bougalis is leaving the company after nearly 10 years, becoming the latest of the longtime crypto executives to leave the space.

In a tweet on October 22, Bougalis noted that: "My decade-long journey at Ripple has been fantastic (albeit exhausting and all-consuming). I got to work on a project I love, towards a goal I believe in. But this journey will end in a few weeks.”

"All good things…"

My decade-long journey at @Ripple has been fantastic (albeit exhausting and all-consuming).

I have to work on a project that I love, towards a goal that I believe in.

But this trip will come to an end in a few weeks.

Interestingly, the Ripple developer noted that he would not be joining a blockchain project or company next.

"What's next? I'll talk about it when the time is right, but I'm NOT joining another blockchain project/company, nor do I do NFT or DeFi" , he said.

Bougalis has a long background in software engineering and cryptography, and at Ripple he mainly worked on open source code projects for XRP Ledger payments, also known as XRPL.

One of Ripple's major recent developments that Bougalis has overseen is the XLS-20 amendment which will see the introduction of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into XRPL. Although there were some initial bugs that would have