- Stellar Lumens hires an executive with over 20 years of experience at Goldman Sachs and Netflix.
- SDF’s CEO publishes a letter sent to FinCEN about the regulation on Bitcoin and crypto-wallets.
With an increase of more than 100% in the last 30 days, Stellar Lumens has had a positive year start. In parallel, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is expanding and adding new members to its team.
The latest addition is Karen C. Chang as Vice President of Engineering. According to her LinkedIn profile, Chang has held several positions throughout her 20 years of work experience. Among them, she was Director of Engineering for Real Time Analytics at Netflix, VP Engineering for the Securities Data Platform of Goldman Sachs, and Director of Engineering for the IoT Cloud Platform of Salesforce.
At the Stellar Development Foundation, Chang will lead the creation of the adoption strategy for use cases based on Stellar technology. SDF has expressed the following about integrating Chang into its team:
As VP of Engineering, Karen will be steering our strategic priority to ensure the usability of Stellar’s technology. We are confident that she will lead our engineers and Stellar’s technical capabilities to new heights. With her track record in creating innovative platforms, scaling technology, and leading high-performing, diverse teams, we believe she is going to be an invaluable leader at SDF in 2021 and beyond.
Stellar’s response to regulation on Bitcoin and crypto wallets
On the other hand, the CEO of Stellar’s Development Foundation, Denelle Dixon, published the commentary the company has issued on FinCEN’s proposed regulation for Bitcoin and crypto wallets. Thus, the SDF joins Square, the Blockchain Association, Coinbase, and thousands of other crypto-space actors in expressing “concern” about the new rule.
The SDF stresses that if the regulation is passed, there could be unintended consequences affecting the crypto ecosystem and the blockchain industry. Furthermore, they indicate that the new rule ignores how a blockchain operates, its benefits and adds that it will create further complications to the security and privacy of users.
Dixon agrees that bad actors and criminal activities should be prevented from using blockchain technology. However, she calls for preserving innovation and proposes an “outside the legacy system” approach. SDF’s CEO added:
New technology deserves new approaches to regulation. The proposal from FinCEN seeks to apply a regulatory framework designed for a centralized, intermediary-based financial system. That’s not blockchain. Foisting antiquated rules onto entirely new paradigms doesn’t work – and it won’t work here.
As reported by CNF, the FinCEN has proposed a rule for providers of crypto-related services that will force them to require more information from users of “self-custody” or “cover” wallets. The regulator asked for public comments. The submission period ends on January 7th. Data shared by Compound’s General Counsel, Jake Chervinsky, shows that FinCEN has received an overwhelming feedback with nearly 65,000 comments.
So, a weird thing happened with the FinCEN rule…a lot more comments were filed this week.
Like, a *LOT* more. 👀
The website only lets you read ~3k, maybe because the rest are duplicates (so not shown) or are still being loaded: https://t.co/6UOSJTxsKT.
But here's the total: pic.twitter.com/87IDYYCAAc
— Jake Chervinsky (@jchervinsky) January 7, 2021