Parity Technologies, the engineering firm behind the implementation of Polkadot has added three new hires to its leadership team, which is led by the founder and CEO Gavin Wood, who’s also the founder of Polkadot, President of the Web 3 Foundation, and co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum. The new executives, Eran Barak (chief operating officer), Peter Ruchatz (chief marketing officer), and Fahmi Syed (chief financial officer), bring decades of experience across finance and fintech, information technology, Saas, telecommunications, marketing, engineering, and media sectors.
As noted in a report by CoinDesk, Eran Barak will be responsible for overseeing people and operations, helping the firm scale to meet its growth needs. He’s previously helped build companies like Thomson Reuters and Symphony Communications, the latter of which raised $450 million (roughly Rs. 3,570 crore) under him as CFO. Eran holds a BSc in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University, and an Executive MBA in Marketing from the Kellogg School of Management.
Fahmi Syed previously served as chief operating officer of FIFTHDELTA, Europe’s largest hedge fund of 2021 with $749 million (roughly Rs. 5,941 crore) in assets under management (AUM) as of Februrary 2022. He also holds experience with Marshall Wallace’s non-investment team, helping grow its AUM to $45 billion (roughly Rs. 3,56,970 crore).
Finally, Peter Ruchtaz held international leadership roles at Microsoft and Salesforce, while sparking growth for other SaaS businesses, like Celonis. As chief marketing officer, he will oversee marketing and communications and drive market education about Polkadot.
Polkadot is not a conventional blockchain. It is actually an ecosystem of interconnected blockchain shards called parallelised chains or parachains. Parachains are application-specific and they connect to and are secured by a single base platform called the ‘Relay Chain’. They can also connect with external networks via bridges.
Relay Chain is the heart of Polkadot and is responsible for the network’s security, consensus, and cross-chain interoperability. It contains Polkadot’s consensus and voting logic.
Parachains are ‘sovereign blockchains’ with their own tokens and are optimised for specific use-cases. Parachains need to pay for connecting to the Relay Chain.
