Meet MELD — Pepe Blasco

Chief Technology Officer👨‍💻

Stuart

Published in

MELD

6 min readDec 5, 2022

Welcome to Meet MELD

This is a series to provide some insight and understanding of the faces behind the MELD team. We have a vast range of engineers, designers, economists, advisors, and researchers from all parts of the world including the United States, Norway, Sweden, Vietnam, Japan, and Canada, and with more partnerships, new team members, and advisors joining the MELD team, this list just keeps on expanding and getting better!

Continue reading to find out about Pepe’s role with MELD…

Click here to see more 👉 Meet MELD articles

❓ Questions and answers…

Pepe Blasco — LinkedIn Profile

Pepe is a young professional who enjoys working on new projects and ideas. He is specialized in the Blockchain and Big Data fields as well as the architecture and coordination of the development of applications and services that use these technologies.

“I love technological innovation and I have been working on the development of new ideas for a long time since I am determined to be part of the evolution toward a connected world in which technology makes life easier for everyone. My curiosity and proactivity lead me to participate in numerous personal projects and always maintain an active profile regarding my career.”

What’s your job position at MELD + what do you do for MELD?

My position at MELD is Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Different companies mean different things for this role, mainly when it comes to management/performance. For MELD, my role is to help grow the tech team, coordinate development, and be a proxy between high management and the dev themselves. I’ve worked with many companies where I had to be in this type of position, coordinating a lot of moving parts, and I’m excited to bring my knowledge and expertise to build the future of DeFi with MELD.

What did you do before working with MELD?

I started my professional career in one of the biggest tech consulting firms in Spain. I was in charge and part of the development process for tooling software for other companies to use.

After 2 years, I decided to jump into a more startup-based environment where I joined ClimateTrade — based on blockchain technology. This was when DeFi and web3 were gaining a lot of traction in the media.

Here I directly managed our IT roadmap and key partnerships, while managing and developing our platform and integrations with external systems. I coordinated the development of integrations with 5 key partners and 10+ small businesses. I analyzed and managed business requirements for product development and created the development plan for the tech team, consisting of 5+ internal developers and 7+ external collaborators.

After that, I was working on cross-chain applications, bridges, and other cross-chain tools with Composable Finance. I was leading a team, developing features, and coordinating/reviewing tasks from a team of developers to complete project requirements with cross-layer solutions on EVM-compatible networks such as Ethereum, Polygon, and Arbitrum.

Now I am here!

When did you first get involved in crypto?

During my university degree, I was in a high-performance student group. This was a smaller group of students that allowed us to research new topics asides from our official degree content.

In one of the subjects that we had, we were introduced to decentralized systems, Bitcoin, and ETH. This was back in 2015 and everything was pretty new back then. What caught my attention was that tech had a direct relationship with money.

It was my first exposure to seeing the direct relationship between technical speak to real-world money and dollars that we can actually use.

Shortly after this, I developed my blockchain as a hobby — This didn’t go well... But I learned lots of key aspects of how blockchain technology works. Which then led to my professional career.

I then created a student association for ethical hacking along with some friends— my responsibilities were blockchain related. I gave some conferences at university on the subject — I basically started moving all things blockchain. It was early in the crypto boom and I already knew the tech stuff so I was a great candidate to lead the association. In one of the talks I gave, the university was expecting around 20 people. But a couple hundred arrived!

Here I was teaching hands-on experience for how to write a smart contract, and deploy it to a blockchain, while teaching about various attack vectors, and how to write code in a way to mitigate these threats. This all kickstarted the blockchain feeling within me and the university.

What do you like the most about crypto?

I have 2 things I really like about crypto:

Security and decentralization.
I love how there can be databases that are open source, store information forever in a secure way, and are completely decentralized. I love the way that blockchain technology is giving us a way to create trustless systems where we don’t have to rely on a third party to keep our information safe.
Potential.
The second thing I love about crypto and the blockchain space is the potential that has yet to be seen. For me, it is the technology and the potential for what can be created. I am interested in what’s to come. The tools to realize these potentials are still being developed and we’ll most likely be learning and seeing new tech/tools and use cases for them, for the next couple of years at least.

Do you have any predictions on where crypto will be 5 years from now?

It will become transparent for end users. That’s the way things seem to be going. Currently, you have to be quite tech-savvy/knowledgeable to be able to understand and navigate the non-physical web3 ecosystem. As time goes on, with new tools and ecosystems being developed, users will be able to interact with these applications more seamlessly. At least that’s where I hope we are leading — to a more world-inclusive environment. And not just the smart tech/finance guys.

What do you like doing outside of crypto and MELD?

I would say eating! I love eating and cooking or going for a weekend with my friends to a grill house and BBQ — I love that.

I also really like music festivals — indie/pop rock. For me, it’s more about going to places where I can talk with people and socialize. But then you can find me in the front row, unable to hear anything but the music.

Lastly, I’m interested in sustainability and mobility. Specifically, long-term sustainable modes for human transportation, like walking and biking.

MELD — Be Your Own Bank

We think it’s essential for everyone to gain control of their financial lives and have equal access to financial instruments used by professionals, not just centralized institutions, governments, or the 1%. We want to provide financial freedom and control to the masses, including the unbanked.

We have a long-term goal to enable the $15 trillion that is currently locked out of the global economy, including 2 billion individuals worldwide that are either underbanked or have no access to banking services whatsoever, access to these tools. These are the people that are paying the highest fees, and getting the worst customer service, and they are the ones that are having the most problems.

Our vision is to create an ecosystem that empowers individuals to regain financial control by providing them with the tools and services they need to manage their money on their terms. Whether that be creating a collateralized debt position (CDP) with cryptocurrency, earning an interest return for lending fiat to borrowers, or even participating in reward incentive programs, we strive to provide our users with the functions they need to manage their own financial lives.