The chief executive of blockchain company Algorand has stepped down, and the company’s chief operating officer will take his place.
As the Boston firm said in a news release Wednesday (July 27), W. Sean Ford has been named Algorand’s interim CEO, replacing outgoing Chief Executive G. Steven Kokinos, who is leaving to pursue other interests. Kokonis is set to remain with Algorand as a senior advisor until the middle of next year.
“We thank Steven for his time and dedication to Algorand. He has been instrumental to the initial success of our business, and we appreciate his commitment to a seamless transition,” said Founder Silvio Micali, an MIT professor and Turing Award-winning mathematician who specializes in cryptography, secrecy and blockchain. “Sean is well positioned to partner with me to keep the company operations running business as usual, and to help us transition Algorand to our next phase of growth.”
PYMNTS profiled Algorand earlier this year, referring to it as “a smart-contract platform that aims to provide a faster, cheaper, more secure, more scalable blockchain transaction.”
“By the numbers, Algorand can process 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) and has a sub-5-second block time, which refers to the frequency with which new blocks of transactions are written onto the blockchain, and thus finalized,” PYMNTS said.
Ford joined Algorand in 2018 following a stint at LogMeIn, where he served as chief marketing officer. He’s held a number of other leadership roles, including CMO and COO of Zmags, CMO of Syncsort, and vice president of the global business unit marketing at Oracle.
Algorand said that it has seen “significant growth” this year, including its recent appointment as the official blockchain platform of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the worldwide governing body of association football.
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