The Team Behind BarnBridge
BarnBridge is a massive build that requires a lot of work and expertise. DeFi itself is not an easy topic but creating a risk tokenization protocol is a complex process that also requires an understanding of how the traditional financial markets work.
In order to ensure the protocol is not only built, but built well, the BarnBridge team is composed of industry veterans with a track record of building.
Core Team
The core team consists of 14 people. That includes founders, developers, designers and operations managers. Let’s list them out by departments.
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Tyler Ward, Co-Founder
Tyler was the one who came up with the original idea of BarnBridge. Since his graduation from the university, Tyler has always had an entrepreneurship spirit. His first business was an eCommerce company called Giddy which he sold in 2015 when he started selling gag gifts via eCommerce. He founded one of the largest marketing & UI/UX companies specializing in blockchain and digital assets.
Tyler has worked with ConsenSys, Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase), FOAM, Dether, Grid+, Centrality, Sylo, NEAR Protocol, DARMA Capital, Within, SingularDTV & the snglsDAO. His way in crypto started in late 2016 so he has been in the industry literally for years.
Troy Murray, Co-Founder
Troy runs RUDE_labs, a crypto-centric artist company. He has been exploring the many benefits that blockchain can bring to media and artists since 2012 when he got bit by the Bitcoin bug and has been falling down the rabbit hole ever since.
Troy has worked in and around the Crypto space, devoting most of his time to Ethereum based projects. He was previously working on SingularDTV/Breaker and snglsDAO trying to decentralize media and entertainment. Before that was building a Title III equity crowdfunding platform using Ethereum tokens in 2016.
Milad Mostavi, Co-Founder
Milad is taking the CTO role in BarnBridge. He is a seasoned software architect and in the past 5 years has worked with ConsenSys on a dozen different projects. His contribution was decisive in successfully launching SingularDTV and Gnosis and orchestrated the development of SingularDTV’s entertainment decentralised ecosystem.
Dragos Rizescu, Co-Founder
Dragos is responsible for the product development of the BarnBridge products. His background is full stack developer with a passion for building highly scalable user interfaces; and in the past 5 years has been at the forefront of WEB3 technologies. He co-founded Treum.io, a blockchain supply chain solution that brings transparency, traceability and tradability to highly valuable physical assets.
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Bogdan Gheorghe, Co-Founder/Project Lead
Bogdan considers himself a DeFi nerd. With a background in mathematics and data science, he spent the past 2 years at Alethio doing data analysis on blockchain data, using and researching almost all DeFi protocols in order to put a DeFi flavor to the Alethio product suite. Having also worked on development and sales for the Codefi DeFi data API, he was in contact with all of the major protocol teams. Now, he is taking the product owner and management responsibility to build BarnBridge protocol and products.
Casian Lacatusu, Blockchain Developer
Casian has had a passion for programming since childhood and a professional background in computer science. Focus driven on backend development, specialized in (& big fan of) Golang, also doing solidity. He has spent 4 years in the Ethereum ecosystem and was a big part of it from building data pipelines that extract and process information from the Ethereum blockchain, turning low-level information into high level, meaningful data — also helped Casian understand a lot about how smart contracts work at a deeper level.
Razvan Pop, Blockchain Developer
Razvan is a software developer with 20 years of experience working across multiple stacks and solving a wide variety of problems. He is taking a key role in the development of the smart contracts of the BarnBridge protocol. Before joining the team, Razvan wrote the solidity contracts used in the SingularDTV/Breaker ecosystem and developed other parts of the infrastructure. Previously, he has led several development teams at Europe’s largest online dating website. He holds a couple of patents related to online video advertising.
Slava Matvienco, Frontend Developer
Slava is an experienced full stack developer having a keen eye for details. He has been involved in the blockchain space since 2017, which provided him the experience to implement the UI and UX of the BarnBridge products. His favorite programming language is Kotlin but he is a pro with TypeScript and JavaScript. Previously, he was part of ConsenSys and, before that, he had been the tech lead for multiple Warner Chappell Music projects.
Vlad Suciu, Software Tester
Vlad is a software tester with more than 10 years of experience. He discovered the blockchain world early 2016 and has been hooked with it. Previously, he worked at ConsenSys where he served as a key member of multiple software development teams as the lead QA tester getting him accustomed to all the aspects of development of a blockchain product. Now, he is hunting bugs and making sure everything works as intended for the BarnBridge products.
Denis Firu, UI/UX Designer
Denis always thought of himself as a technical person but one of his biggest hobbies growing up was UI/UX and graphics design. With a background in computer science and love for new technologies, he decided to combine both worlds and now works as a UI/UX designer building apps for the crypto world.
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Akin Sawyerr, Operations
Akin spent fifteen years in management consulting, secondary mortgage finance, and international development. Akin was previously the Strategy and Africa Lead for Decred. He also serves as a Non-Executive Director of Splash Mobile Money and is an advisor to EMTech, a Central Bank Digital Currency platform. He led strategic and organization transformation projects at Booz Allen Hamilton and Accenture in Washington, D.C., and held strategy and business analysis positions with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. He started his career at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the Technology and General Services Group where he conducted economic research and data analysis in support of IMF country strategies across Africa, Asia and Europe. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Economics with a minor in Political Science from Union College, New York, and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from The Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Akin is part of the Operations team leading Strategy and Partnerships.
Pavlo Bendus, Operations
Pavlo is a Growth Marketing specialist. He specializes in digital pay per click advertising, email marketing, and tracking tools. His Master’s level background in software engineering helps him better understand under the hood algorithms associated with advertising, blockchain, and DeFi. Pavlo has worked with many high-tech blockchain projects, such as Centrality, Sylo, NEAR Protocol, Blockchain Center, SingularDTV, and others.
Mark Ward, Operations
Mark has a Finance degree from the University of Tampa and started his career as head of Operations and Finances for Proof Systems. Mark was involved early with the beginning stages of BarnBridge due to his close relationship with the founders. He continues to push for the adoption of widespread decentralized technology for things other than DeFi like censorship, government, taxes, art preservation, and much more. Strong believer of hard work and teamwork.
Vitalik Cherniak, Operations
Vitalik started working in marketing 4 years ago. He was originally studying software engineering in Poland but his real passion was to help projects grow, so he co-founded a marketing agency. It allowed him to get experience in different areas from strategy development to implementation and post-analysis. Vitalik speaks four languages and it helped him to work with clients all over the world. Now he is a part of the BarnBridge Operations team helping with the marketing and community management.
Liquidity Providers
Liquidity will be provided by our partners and investors — Fourth Revolution Capital and ParaFi Capital.
Fourth Revolution Capital, investment firm
4RC’s investment thesis is centered on the belief that decentralized computing and web3 networks will become the digital infrastructure of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We’re hands-on, stage-agnostic partners focused on long-term product-market fit and sustainable utility. We invest in digital assets and teams building the web3 future by contributing to early-stage tokenomic design, providing institutional liquidity, engaging in governance, and supporting ongoing operations with marketing and developer resources.
ParaFi Capital, investment firm
ParaFi Capital is an alternative investment firm focused on blockchain and decentralized finance markets. They take a unique multidisciplinary approach to identifying untapped opportunities through a research intensive, long-term focused investment framework. ParaFi Capital’s investors include leading institutional allocators, family offices, HNWIs, and venture capital firms, including Bain Capital Ventures LLC as a strategic partner.
Technology Partners & Advisors
The product development is managed by Digital MOB. We also have access to the expertise and advisory of Nils Bundi & Johannes Pfeffer from Atpar, and Aaron McDonald from Centrality.
Digital MOB, Blockchain Development Company
Digital MOB, a software development company experienced in building complex blockchain products, is taking the technical role in the product with an extensive team of web3 developers, web and mobile developers, system architects, security experts, and analysts.
Atpar, Blockchain Company
Atpar — the company behind ACTUS protocol, whose goal is to provide the Ethereum community with the tools necessary for fulfilling the vision of an open, interoperable and frictionless financial ecosystem. At its core, the ACTUS Protocol leverages the Algorithmic Contract Types Unified Standards (ACTUS) which is a standardized representation of all kinds of financial contracts in terms of their legal obligations.
Centrality, Blockchain Venture Studio
Centrality is a New Zealand based company and tech venture platform. They leverage blockchain, AI, IoT and other emerging technologies to create an advanced and connected world. We’re fostering a user-centric approach and open-source culture to build the infrastructure for the emerging decentralised web. Centrality’s ecosystem is growing with developers, ventures, partnered businesses and startups that are passionate about creating a thriving decentralised future.
We are excited to have support from the founders of the leading DeFi projects, such as Kain from Synthetix and Stani from Aave.
And, of course, we wouldn’t be able to get so far without our amazing community. Special shout out to all our Knights and active Discord members as well as big thanks to the people who support our project across all social media platforms. We value your support and the possibility to build this product together.
Our team envisions its mission to provide the best possible UI/UX experience for tokenizing risk on the blockchain.
Let’s keep doing it together!
