Former JPMorgan Exec Named Algorand Foundation CEO

Staci Warden also brings experience from roles at the Milken Institute, Nasdaq and the US Treasury Department. Read the full article by Ben Strack “Neither this post nor any other on cryptofal.com should be taken as financial advice. It is not.”

Algorand is an interesting project that does not get talked about in the Ethereum killer narrative. Algo is a super-efficient blockchain where you can build applications and facilitate transactions at lightning speeds for basically no cost. They can process up to 1,300 transactions per second currently with fees of 0.001 Algo and are looking to soon be able to 3,000 TPS. One reason they are not as highly talked about is that they are marketing to a different type of client.

Algorand was founded by Silvio Macali a professor at MIT. They want to use their blockchain to help companies that would be considered institutional. To help them get that going they have just named former JP Morgan exec Staci Warden as the new Algorand Foundation CEO. She had first started getting into cryptocurrencies in 2013.

“For me, I think it hit particularly hard because I had such a deep experience in developing countries and emerging markets where financial intermediaries don’t function very well and where they can be really rent-seeking to people that are just trying to save money, invest it properly and make their lives better,” Warden explained.

Warden believes that Algorand is best suited for the job ahead with an estimated 1.7 billion people around the world that do not have any access to finance. She notes that Algo has the best speed, security, and decentralization to combat this issue on a large scale. This would make Algo also the best suited to tackle the blockchain trilemma which means you can not be equally secure, scalable, and decentralized at the same time. This would be much more effective than ETH at the moment since it can only process 15 TPS and the costs are outrageously high.

Warden wants to improve the marketing and communications for the foundation by adding more people to the community engagement team. “We absolutely need to focus on that and draw liquidity and draw the best developers and draw the smartest entrepreneurs to the Algorand ecosystem and our layer-1 so that we can help them build up this ecosystem,” she added. “In the longer-term, it’s going to be a real-world play, making sure that we are the layer-1 that wallets use for real-world payments,” said Warden.