People of OST: Marina Antonova, Business Development Manager
Marina Antonova has seven years of experience in business development and partner management in IT and mobile marketing industries. She enjoys exploring cities by bike and playing the piano.
Tell us about yourself!
I grew up in Saint Petersburg, Russia. I started my career working as an English schoolteacher. I then began working in software sales, which brought me to Berlin. I started working with server virtualization and moved to the mobile marketing industry. I’m really enjoying exploring new technologies and understanding the market’s needs. I enjoy breaking down sophisticated technology to deliver the main idea to the consumer. Explaining things to kids at school was a very good foundation for my career.
What piqued your interest in blockchain technology?
I got into blockchain about 18 months ago, and it led me to think and understand what stands behind this scary word crypto. I developed an interest when I realized that it’s a technology that in a nutshell is what Web 2.0 to is missing. When I was in the mobile marketing industry, I could not get rid of the feeling that the industry is unbalanced and heavily dominated by the larger players on the field. Transparency and immutability were always required by the advertising companies. Finally there was a technology that was built on those pillars. I just couldn’t say no to blockchain
What does your role as business development manager at OST entail?
I spent some time working on the product side of Know Your Customer for OST. We have a really good team of developers that I think are capable of accomplishing anything, to be honest. One of their creations was a platform allowing automated KYC checks for token sales. We used it for our own ICO in 2017 and then productized it. It’s now available for any company to use. The time has come to for us to integrate OST KYC as part of our main tool, OST KIT.
As a business development manager, I connect with many companies. The main goal is to identify the companies with business models that can benefit and receive real value from tokenization. Crypto sounds complicated, and my main job is to become the bridge that connects consumer companies with technology that I believe will be a foundation of the new internet.
What type of businesses can benefit most from tokenization?
Ideally, companies that have platforms with millions of users interacting with each other as a digital community would benefit most from tokenization. A good example would be a company that already has some sort of loyalty program in place and would like to enable users to earn, buy, and spend tokens in their economy. Because blockchain tokens have real value behind them, a blockchain-based economy would enable a more powerful community that would help to intensify and reward users. With OST KIT, you get all the blockchain benefits with easy-to-use APIs and without the expense, time, and regulatory issues that are normally associated with tokenization.
What is your favorite hobby?
I enjoy sports; my favorite game is tennis. We all should do sports to have an active lifestyle. I also played piano my whole life, but I had to make a break after moving to Berlin. I think that now is the time to play piano and I’m targeting for this to be my main hobby throughout winter.
THANK YOU, MARINA!
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About OST
OST blockchain infrastructure empowers new economies for mainstream businesses and emerging DApps. OST leads development of the OpenST Protocol, a framework for tokenizing businesses. In September 2018 OST introduced the OpenST Mosaic Protocol for running meta-blockchains to scale Ethereum applications to billions of users. OST KIT is a full-stack suite of developer tools, APIs, and SDKs for managing blockchain economies. OST partners reach more than 300 million end-users. OST has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures, and 500 Startups.
