December 13th 2022, ZUG, Switzerland — NEAR Foundation, the non-profit foundation that supports ecosystem development of the NEAR Protocol, today announced several new high-profile executive appointments.
It has hired Mary Beth Buchanan as a Strategic Advisor, while Sheila Warren and Jason Warner have joined as participants of the NEAR Foundation Council.
Mary Beth Buchanan is the former United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the first woman and youngest person to be appointed to the position. Since then, she has served as President, Americas and Global Chief Legal Officer for Merkle Science; Chief Legal Officer for both Kraken and Bitstamp, and is the Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Cardano Foundation.
She brings over three decades of legal and business expertise at the intersection of federal law enforcement, global interagency cooperation, corporate compliance, digital assets, and emerging regulatory frameworks. She has been at the forefront of the digital assets industry since 2013 while she was a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner and led the firm’s Digital Currency Team.
Buchanan’s unique combination of experience makes her a forward-thinking leader in crypto compliance, regulatory, and legal matters. As a former United States Attorney, she has extensive prosecutorial experience, and has conducted ethics and reputational risk assessments for the United Nations. Her career has also focused on internal investigations, corporate compliance, SEC enforcement matters, Congressional investigations. In private practice, she has also helped many young companies navigate uncertain global regulatory frameworks.
Alongside Buchanan’s appointment is that of Sheila Warren, who currently serves as the inaugural CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, the premier global alliance advancing crypto innovation worldwide. She co-hosts “Money Reimagined,” a CoinDesk TV show and podcast, is an advisor to the Filecoin Foundation, serves on the Steering Committee of the DeFi Education Fund, and is an early stage investor across the Web3 ecosystem.
Previously, Sheila founded the blockchain and digital assets team at the World Economic Forum, where she served as a member of the Executive Committee. As the Deputy Global Head of the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, she oversaw strategy across 16 countries to advance the adoption of new technologies in the global public interest.
NEAR also welcomes Jason Warner, the former CTO of GitHub and currently the Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. Prior to joining GitHub, Jason was Vice President of Engineering at Heroku, the world’s leading PaaS and one of the largest cloud computing providers in the world. He is an active speaker, writer, and advisor on cloud computing, technology, and leadership.
Welcoming the appointments, Marieke Flament, CEO of the NEAR Foundation, said:
“Changing the world does not happen without great people working together, and we are thrilled to be welcoming this calibre of leader on board as we continue on our goals to put usability at the heart of a global shift towards Web3. Mary Beth, Sheila and Jason have collectively spent decades creating the infrastructure necessary for society to be ready for this momentum and shift – we could not be more excited to have them join us on our mission.”
NEAR is a collective, a foundation, and a development platform built on a new layer-one blockchain – designed to be super-fast, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable. There are 20+ million accounts on the NEAR network, more than 100 projects building, and 200 million transactions to date, with the NEAR network being used for 300,000 to 400,000 transactions per day.
About NEAR Foundation
NEAR Foundation is the non-profit organisation that supports ecosystem development on NEAR – a high-performance blockchain built without limits. Designed to be super-fast, incredibly secure, and infinitely scalable, NEAR allows anyone to build at scale and deploy at pace. NEAR’s vision is to create a network that enables people to reimagine finance, creativity, and community in new and inclusive ways. With NEAR, blockchain mass adoption is possible.
NEAR is built by an award-winning team of engineers and entrepreneurs to be simple to use, inclusive, and good for the environment. NEAR is backed by top VCs such as A16Z, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, and Baidu Ventures.