José Fernández da Ponte, formerly the head of blockchain at PayPal, has left the fintech giant, where he oversaw the roll-out of digital currencies and stablecoins, to become president and chief growth officer of the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF).
The foundation also said it appointed Jason Karsh, a former Block and Blockchain.com executive, as chief marketing officer.
The Stellar blockchain operates a cash on and off-ramp network through MoneyGram as well as tokenizing real world assets with partners including Franklin Templeton. But going back over a decade, Stellar has kept in mind humanitarian missions such as improving financial inclusion in developing counties — a deciding factor in his decision to move, Fernández da Ponte said.
“I believe that blockchains are an artifact for a community of people working together in a decentralized way to fix problems,” he said in an interview. “And if the problem that you’re trying to work on is financial inclusion, which is the problem I am interested in, then there’s no better place than Stellar to work on that.”
Karsh, who has also held positions at Coinbase and security firm Blockaid, will bring together brand, product and ecosystem strategy to strengthen Stellar’s presence with developers, institutions and the public.
“Stellar isn’t just another blockchain project; it’s financial infrastructure that is used each day by institutions and individuals around the world,” Karsh said in a statement. “Our job is to accelerate adoption and usage for every organization, builder and blockchain enthusiast who cares about enterprise-grade security, transaction speed, and the ease of programmability that builders have come to expect.”
Fernández da Ponte, who worked for Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), and McKinsey before PayPal, led the strategic launch of the payment firm’s PYUSD stablecoin.
Asked if he didn’t have the stomach to stay in the trenches for the ensuing stablecoin wars, Fernández da Ponte said the move to Stellar was more about choosing to work at the infrastructure layer, ensuring applications like stablecoins can run at scale.
“The stablecoin wars are going to be interesting,” Fernández da Ponte said. “But we need to have the technology primitives for those stablecoins to be useful, and that’s why working at the blockchain level is so important.”
