Founders

Will Martino, Founder & CEO

Will was Lead Engineer for Juno, JP Morgan’s first blockchain, and was previously Tech Lead for the SEC's Cryptocurrency Steering Committee and the Quantitative Analytics Unit.

Stuart Popejoy, Founder & President

Stuart directed JP Morgan's Blockchain Center of Excellence, and has 15 years experience building trading systems and exchange backbones for the financial industry.

Business

Monica Quaintance, Head of Research & Networks

Monica led database engineering at Rent The Runway and was a quant for the SEC, before which she worked in investment banking for Cushman & Wakefield.

Anatasia Bez, Director of Operations

Before joining Kadena, Anastasia conducted research with the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, where she also organized initiatives on geopolitics, cyber security, and foreign and domestic policy.

Leah Bingham, Operations Coordinator

Leah is on Kadena's Operations team which handles everything from culture management to finances to strategic planning. Leah's specialties are in logistics, planning, and research. Prior to joining Kadena, Leah was an inventory data specialist at Diamonds International.

Jeffrey Ou, Operations Analyst

Jeffrey is a recent graduate from Middlebury College where he majored in Physics and minored in Philosophy. He brings experience from his previous internships at both law firms and in-house legal departments.

Marketing

Tony Pham, Head of Marketing

Tony joins to raise awareness of and engagement with Kadena's technologies. He brings expertise in branding, customer development, and product marketing. Previously, Tony led the marketing divisions at Coin (acquired by Fitbit), Life360, and Slide (acquired by Google).

Francesco Melpignano, Head of Product

Francesco is a technologist with a background in blockchain, AI, and robotics. Soon after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he founded and exited a startup in the automated sports field maintenance space. He brings his passion and experience in hardware manufacturing and data integrity to the blockchain industry.

Engineering

Doug Beardsley, Director of Engineering

Doug has 15 years of software engineering experience including 8 years using Haskell professionally. He also co-organizes the Compose Conference, the New York Haskell Users Group, and is one of the original authors of the Snap web framework.

Lars Khutz, Engineer

Lars Kuhtz is an expert in distributed systems and formal methods, formerly building distributed development tools for Microsoft. He has built cloud storage backends, cryptographic services, and verification tools.

Emily Pillmore, Engineer

Emily is a Haskell developer and chartered mathematician who has worked on massively distributed systems and helps maintain the largest and longest running functional programming library on the JVM. She serves on the standing committee of the Haskell programming language.

Linda Ortega, Engineer

Linda is a recent Computer Science graduate from Barnard College and brings experience in software engineering, product development, and functional programming in OCaml.

Hee Kyun Yun, Engineer

Hee Kyun is a full-stack developer with experience in decentralized applications. She has a B.S. in Operations Research and Engineering from Cornell University and had previously worked as a business analyst at CJ E&M.

Advisors

Stuart Haber, Cryptography

Dr. Stuart Haber is a renowned cryptographer who laid the groundwork for blockchain back in 1990. During his time at Bellcore, Dr. Haber and his colleague W. Scott Stornetta published a series of papers outlining the concept of blockchain; they were the most cited authors in the seminal 2008 Bitcoin paper by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Wayne Martino, Legal

Wayne has decades of legal and business experience with companies and entrepreneurs in emerging growth industries including the early stages of the commercial internet, new media and nanotech and, since 2013, working in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Alex Pinchev, Marketing

Alex Pinchev has over 30 years’ leadership and marketing experience in the software industry. He served as Executive Vice President (EVP) and President of Global Sales and Marketing at open source software company Red Hat and cloud computing company Rackspace.