Technology executive with 30 years in payments and crypto. I'm at my best on the hard calls in complex environments, and on growing teams capable of making them without me. I've built engineering organisations from first hire to 100+, and shipped at the frontier: enterprise bitcoin in 2014, one of the first Ethereum Layer 2s in 2018. I'm currently building an inheritable multi-chain assisted self-custody vault.
Experience
- Report to the group CEO, leading a high-velocity team of 10 that takes 0→1 crypto-enabled financial products from idea to market.
- Own the P&L for Uphold Vault, an assisted self-custody product since extended into inheritance: past $1m/yr in subscription revenue, with zero downtime and zero loss of customer funds.
- Shipped Tesuji Plasma, one of the first working Plasma child-chain implementations on Ethereum, establishing the network as a Layer 2 pioneer.
- Led delivery of OMG Network V1 mainnet beta — protocol from testnet to production, and the rebrand of OmiseGO into OMG Network.
- Launched a Plasma-based P2P payment network at up to 4,000 TPS and ~90% lower fees than Ethereum mainnet; the architecture was selected by Tether for its stablecoin sidechain.
Dublin, Ireland · Oct 2017 – Apr 2018
Belfast, UK · Aug 2016 – Oct 2017
- Established and grew the Belfast blockchain lab following Rakuten's acquisition of Bitnet's IP, delivering DLT prototypes and a production Bitcoin wallet services suite with group teams in Tokyo.
- Co-founded an enterprise bitcoin payment processor for large merchants; raised a $14.5m Series A led by Highland Capital Partners. Platform ran in production across Rakuten’s US, German and Austrian marketplaces; IP and team acquired by Rakuten in 2016.
Foster City, CA · Jul 2011 – Jan 2014
- Ran technology for a platform serving 295,000+ merchants and roughly a quarter of all US e-commerce spend at the time of Visa's $2bn acquisition.
- Set the post-acquisition technology strategy; delivered a new platform architecture and developer API suite.
Belfast, UK · Aug 2008 – Jul 2011
- Founded CyberSource's Belfast development centre from zero — hired and trained an engineering and product organisation of 100+, with new products in market inside the first year.
Side projects
Whistlea privacy-first, open-source group location sharing app built on Nostr and MLS. End-to-end encrypted: no accounts, no servers, no tracking, no permission required.