Fred L Merritt, Jr. founder and managing partner for Merritt Exchange, enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and worked full time while earning an Associate in Arts from Northern Virginia Community College and a Bachelor of Science Foreign Service Degree from Georgetown University.

Fred has spent most of his professional career as a successful Information Technology consultant holding a variety of positions including roles as an application developer, systems engineer, database/systems administrator, solutions architect, project lead, and project manager. He started his career as a mainframe programmer for the United States Marine Corps, moved quickly to minicomputers, then shifted to large enterprise financial management, asset, and human capital application systems for private and public sector customers. He brings functional and technical expertise working in numerous platforms including mobile apps, large enterprise commercial-off-the-shelf enterprise applications, leading cloud service platforms, blockchain technology providers, and legacy mainframe environments. Over his career, Fred has been an entrepreneur offering innovation in many different environments. Not long before the housing crisis in 2008 Fred became interested in the comparison and contrast between “fiat currency” and ‘gold backed currency”. Fred began reading the great works in economics and doing some independent research. As a result, he became interested in using assets as a medium of exchange and the basis of Merritt Exchange was born.

Fred began the design of the Merritt Exchange software in Oct 2015. He has led the company as Founder and CEO since its inception. Fred has held three separate provisional patents (including one currently held by Merritt Exchange) and has been awarded a process patent. Fred has recently submitted a provisional patent application for Viridi Numu, currently under evaluation by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Specific to blockchain, Fred has completed certified training programs from the Harvard VPAL FinTech online short course and the Blockchain Training Alliance and continues to evaluate market solution offerings and potential use cases. Fred is also launching a registration based Blockchain virtual working group to enhance collaboration, promote idea sharing, and address challenges.