SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TrustToken, the team behind TrueFi, the leading unsecured lending protocol, and popular stablecoins including TrueUSD, announces the addition of Wall Street and Silicon Valley veterans to its C-suite as part of a growing focus on servicing institutional finance with its a suite of DeFi solutions. The company also onboarded former Ethworks engineers onto its senior team, having acquired the Web3 development company in September. TrustToken’s newly-structured senior leadership will expand TrueFi's reach into the traditional financial sector, direct the development of new DeFi products, manage the integration of the recent and future acquisitions, and guide TrueFi's progressive decentralization.
Built in Silicon Valley, TrustToken is now evolving its products to reach Wall Street, building TrueFi into robust financial infrastructure that stands to bring traditional finance into the next era. By adding veteran Silicon Valley and Wall Street leaders, the company is building a team that merges a time-tested understanding of the banking world with state-of-the-art technological expertise, working to more deeply integrate TrustToken’s synthetic assets and DeFi protocol into the traditional finance ecosystem.
Joining the team as Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) is Tom Shields, a seasoned technical founder and investor. Having taken NetGravity public in 1998 as CTO, Shields brings decades of experience in management and strategy across enterprise and consumer-based startups, including one of the world's largest multi-sided marketplaces. Having founded, invested in, sat on the boards of, and advised founders at dozens of mission-driven companies, Tom has a deep background in the technology sector. He has served as an advisor for TrustToken and also acts as Chairman of the Board, and will now take on a more central, day-to-day role in the company’s operations.
As the newest member of TrustToken’s senior leadership team, Russell Korte has taken up the reins as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Prior to joining the company, Russell was CFO at Allegro Credit, leading the sale of the consumer lending company to Synchrony Financial, a $100 billion consumer lending institution, in early 2021. Russell brings robust experience in TradFi and specialty finance, which will be crucial for advancing TrustToken’s push for institutional DeFi adoption and, ultimately, bringing about the company’s vision of collaboration between DeFi and TradFi as the finance of the future.
The Wall Street and Silicon Valley veterans are joining an executive team which now also includes a line-up of seasoned technical and design talent, part of the recent Ethworks acquisition. Marek Kirejczyk, an experienced founder, engineer, and Ethworks’ co-founder, joins TrustToken’s ranks as Chief Technical Officer (CTO), overseeing the infrastructure, products, and security behind TrustToken’s projects. Natalia Kirejczyk, another Ethworks veteran who took part in redesigning bitcoin.org (the original Bitcoin website), takes over as the VP of Design, managing TrustToken platform’s user experience and visual outlay. Krzysztof Jelski, the new VP of Engineering with over 15 years worth of experience in software development, will be leading the company’s day-to-day technical management efforts, serving as a senior manager and technical lead.
“I’m confident that the new senior leadership team will prove decisive for TrueFi’s development,” says Rafael Cosman, CEO and Co-founder of TrustToken. “This is the leadership team that will take TrueFi from $1Bn to $1Tn which requires going way beyond the crypto lenders and borrowers that TrueFi primarily works with today.”
“I’m proud to be joining and leading a team which is already changing the DeFi space," says Russell Korte, now CFO of TrustToken. “There is no doubt that the next frontier of finance is to unbundle traditional banking, bringing lending on-chain. TrustToken is pioneering the scaffolds which will support institutional adoption, and I’m excited to join this journey.”
“I built my first company in the early days of the Internet, and I remember how exciting it was to realize we were building foundational technology for a world-changing transformation,” said Tom Shields. “TrustToken gives me that same feeling: we are building foundational infrastructure for the coming transformation of our financial system.“
About TrustToken
TrustToken frees money to create more value. TrustToken’s TrueFi platform brings uncollateralized lending on-chain, offering borrowers the highest possible capital efficiency at competitive rates. TrueFi has to date completed almost $1B in loan originations with a perfect record of repayment, and has over $1B in total value locked.
The company’s TrueCurrencies are the world's first on-chain independently-verified, fully collateralized stablecoins, now trading on top exchanges including Binance, Huobi, and OKEx, generating billions in monthly trade volume. TrueCurrency users enjoy lightning-fast transactions, the lowest transaction costs of any stablecoin, easy exchange to and from fiat currency, and obsessive customer service.
Start using TrueFi at https://truefi.io, or learn more about TrustToken products at https://trusttoken.com
