Blockchain “Titan” Kirk Ballou joins FLUX as CTO & Chief Blockchain Architect
It’s taken us a year to find him, and we feel like every nanosecond was worth it. This month Kirk Ballou joins FLUX as our CTO and Chief Blockchain Architect, giving us the chops and experience needed to launch our vision of a “prosperous future for all,” merging blockchain technologies with hardware so we can listen to Mother Earth.
Kirk (follow him on Twitter here) has over 10 years of experience leading digital development for Fortune 500 companies like National Geographic CNN, Red Bull, & Microsoft hewing these heavyweights into new frontiers through his company Touch Titans.
A contributor to open-source blockchain projects such as Zclassic and Bitcoin Private, along with his technological and business acumen will help FLUX scale out and round out our development team between the United States, Hong Kong and Israel. Among his accomplishments are winning the Stellar Build Challenge, Adobe’s Open Screen Fund, and AT&T’s Calling All Innovators.
“I’ve known Blake for a dozen years and we have had the chance to work symbiotically in other startups. It started with Flux as an advisory position last fall and then the vision of the team inspired me to join Flux as I got to know the team, history and our collective capacity to achieve results,” says Ballou.
“For me it was obvious where I want to spend the next five years: We are in an exceptionally special place right now where blockchain applications are meeting hardware, is meeting unlimited kinds of sensors, is meeting a community that wants to listen and learn from natural systems,” he adds.
“If you just take the siloed data of agriculture, worth trillions, well just imagine when you get a million farmers use FLUX to share best practices, trading data through a peer-to-peer marketplace, well you turn the current system on its head;, leaving room for a whole new economy based on sustainable practices and a fairer distribution of wealth for all.”
“This is a future I want a hand in creating — to be able impact the base of the pyramid, the 3 billion underserved by current economic systems globally and the majority of smallholder farmers that rely on growing their own food to survive,” says Ballou, “and farming is just the first. Imagine the market opportunities and impact in forestry, fish farming, water remediation.?”
At FLUX, Ballou will first start in making our vision of urban farming for all, a reality on the blockchain. He will link growers using our first product built on Flux’s open hardware, MICO, to a peer-to-peer network. will they can exchange recipes and best practices for growing any kind of crop and medicinal herb. They can even then sell these products and services on the network.
“Out of all of the candidates we considered,We met dozens of people, but we chose Kirk because he’s already experienced in both blockchain and large- scale apps and platform development, and he is ready to apply his smarts to disrupting the agriculture system so we can grow a sustainable food supply for all around the world;, starting with Africa and India,” says FLUX CEO Blake Burris.
Ballou is currently leading strategic partnerships and Flux global development teams in Colorado, Israel and Hong Kong.
Follow Kirk!
https://twitter.com/kirkballou
https://medium.com/@kirkballou
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkballou/
If you would like to join our mission, get in touch: careers@fluxiot.com
Flux (www.fluxtoken.io) is a platform technology that applies big data processing and AI to Life Sciences. It’s like a stethoscope for Mother Earth.
