The latest news in digital currencies is a major personnel pickup for Ripple Labs. Brad Garlinghouse, a former executive at both Yahoo! and AOL, will join Ripple Labs as its new COO.

Ripple Labs CEO and co-founder Chris Larsen said Garlinghouse will help the company as it transitions “from building a strong pipeline to execution and exceptional growth.” Garlinghouse was president of applications and commerce at AOL, and spent six years at Yahoo! He was also CEO of Hightail (formerly YouSendIt), and sits on the board of Ancestry.com.

Garlinghouse (pictured) echoes one of Larsen’s favorite themes—the “Internet of Value”—in talking about Ripple’s unique contribution to financial technology. “The opportunity to define the actual framework for the Internet of Value is an order of magnitude bigger than anything else underway in payments today,” he said.

Ripple Labs developed and supports Ripple, a settlement protocol that enables financial networks to securely transfer funds in any currency in real-time. The technology has been integrated and deployed by financial institutions like Fidor Bank AG, currency-exchange businesses like Saldo.mx, and market makers like GSR Markets.

For more on Larsen and the Internet of Value, check out our review of his presentation at the Bank Innovation Conference earlier this year.

Ripple recently made headlines with news of a $30 million investment that put the company’s valuation at more than $100 million. The company opened up its developer portal in March, and lent its technology to the new accelerator for digital currencies launched by CrossCoin Ventures.

Ripple Labs made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2013 (as OpenCoin). The company was founded in September 2012, and is headquartered in San Francisco.