It’s been an exciting week for Stellar cryptocurrency with two major positive developments to write home. First, earlier this week, Coinbase added support for Stellar’s native cryptocurrency Lumens [XLM] to its professional trading platform Coinbase Pro, a move that is expected to increase liquidity for Stellar Lumens. And now, it seems Stellar Development Foundation is getting a new chief executive officer to take over Stellar founder and Executive Director Jed McCaleb’s position in the Foundation.
The oncoming CEO is none other than Denelle Dixon, a long-serving Chief Operations Officer at leading browser developer Mozilla. According to a press release announcing this shuffling of positions at the Foundation, Jed McCaleb will be transitioning to lead architect position “Where he will focus on the network protocol and Stellar’s adoption strategy.”
We’re thrilled to have Denelle lead the Stellar Development Foundation through its next phase of growth
Said McCaleb on the new appointment. Commenting on Denelle’s suitability to lead SDF he said:
Denelle’s long experience leading operations and business at Mozilla, as well as her work on the policy side, with advocacy around Open Internet and encryption and privacy, will be indispensable to SDF in the coming years.
His reference is to Denelle’s role in urging Mozilla to stand against Facebook following the revelation of the Cambridge Analytica data-sharing scandal. Mozilla actually developed and launched “the data-protecting browser extension called Facebook Container within hours” of the news breaking.
This is the first job for Denelle in the cryptocurrency field and she is rather excited. In an introductory statement to the Stellar Community, she said that:
I know that I am at my very best when my work has a purpose, and when I’m pushing for change. And that’s why, on May 1, I am joining the Stellar Development Foundation as the Executive Director and CEO. This is my first role in the crypto space officially. It’s awesome and exciting.
At Mozilla, she led the organization in the fight for Net Neutrality and privacy features across the board. It is her beliefs towards individual privacy especially online that make her uniquely qualified and suited to run a foundation of SDF’s stature more suited towards developing one of the leading projects in the blockchain space.
Denelle Dixon takes her new role on the SDF starting on May 1st, 2019.
