Crypto company Ripple Labs Inc. has hired three new lawyers this year, including two former GCs.

The hires come amid substantial growth at the San Francisco-based company and a surge of public interest in cryptocurrency markets as a whole.

John Muller, one of the two deputy GCs at Ripple, joined the company this month. Muller was the longtime GC for PayPal Inc. from 2000 to 2013. One of his former employees at PayPal just happens to be Ripple's General Counsel Brynly Llyr.

Llyr leads the legal department of six lawyers at the company that created cryptocurrency XRP. She said that although it isn't that common to become the boss of your own former boss, the team is collaborative and isn't focused on titles.

“I stayed in touch with John through the years at eBay and PayPal and after, and when I found out he was considering a full-time legal job, I thought that lined up really well,” Llyr said in an interview Friday. “It was a pleasant surprise.”

Ripple's second deputy GC is Sameer Dhond, who most recently served as general counsel of brain training company Lumos Labs, also known as Lumosity.

Llyr said she had no connection to Dhond before his hiring. He applied online and she said once she and the team met him, they thought he was a “great find” and has since “been able to really add value.”

Dhond will work on various deals and provide commercial support to Ripple, Llyr said.

The company also hired Deborah McCrimmon, a longtime DLA Piper attorney, in January, as senior counsel.

“I knew her work through friends of friends in the area, and I wanted to bring in someone who had a deep background in litigation but who wanted to broaden their career as an attorney at a startup,” Llyr said.

McCrimmon will take the in-house lead with ongoing litigation at Ripple such as its legal battle with blockchain software firm R3 over an agreement on the purchase options of XRP tokens.

Largely, the legal department's backgrounds are in the technology or payments space. Llyr said that because virtual currency is such a new sector, “no one has a deep digital asset background, and I think that's perfectly fine.”

She explained, “I wanted to put together a team of skilled lawyers who have dealt with a lot of issues so we can weave together a holistic approach for how we think about risk, what laws should apply. It's helpful to have folks with different backgrounds.”

Llyr added that Ripple is willing to sit down and work with regulators and discuss how the law applies to the company and its high-tech products.

“We're different than some actors who think, 'we have new technology and therefore no new laws apply,'” she said.

In addition to the three recent hires, Llyr anticipates more in-house lawyers will be added this year as the industry sees more intense oversight from regulators and as Ripple continues to add on to its more than 100 existing partnerships with financial institutions such as Santander and American Express.