Edgars Nemše is the new CEO of the GenLayer Foundation.
The GenLayer Foundation has appointed
@EdgarsNemse, GenLayer co-founder and Chief Product Officer, as its CEO. He leaves his role at GenLayer Labs and joins the Foundation full-time.
The timing is deliberate. Until now the Foundation's job was to set things up: the legal structure, the token framework, the first institutional relationships and the capital to launch well. With the token launch and mainnet approaching, the job changes. The Foundation becomes an operating organization: it stewards the treasury, brings projects onto the network and supports them with engineers, grows the validator set, and establishes the network's governance. On GenLayer those are technical jobs, and they need a technical operator.
Edgars co-authored the GenLayer whitepaper and has led the product from first prototype to the current testnet. Before GenLayer he was CTO at StakeHound and worked on trading strategies at Millburn Ridgefield, an $8B quantitative fund.
The Foundation's leadership team:
@driudor, who founded the Foundation and has led it since, becomes Chief Institutional Officer, leading capital, institutions and key partners.
@raskovsky is Chief Ecosystem Officer, bringing companies and their products onto GenLayer and growing its community. Xavi Cabezas is Chief Marketing Officer, taking GenLayer and the projects building on it to market. GenLayer Labs, led by
@kstellana, remains the protocol and product company, focused on mainnet.
The Foundation's focus under Edgars:
— Through launch. Deliver the token launch and the network's early operations well, and run the treasury responsibly and openly.
— Adoption. GenLayer's adoption will come from teams and companies integrating intelligent contracts into real products. The Foundation's job is to find them, fund them, and build alongside them.
— Handing the network to itself. The Foundation's own work, grants, treasury decisions and governance, should eventually run directly on GenLayer. The end state is DeepThought, the on-chain organization that takes over the Foundation's role. The Foundation is working to a four-year horizon for that handover, and the work starts now.
More on each of these as mainnet approaches.