A few months ago, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Storj Labs Cofounder Shawn Wilkinson at Coinbase’s headquarters in San Francisco. Shawn was presenting to Coinbase’s People of Color Employee Resource Group (ERG), which supports people of color in the blockchain and decentralization areas, both internally at Coinbase as well as externally within the broader industry. In his presentation Shawn shared a bit about the success Storj has seen, an overview of our V3 rebuild, background on our Open Source Partner Program, and how decentralized cloud storage platform has the ability to change technology for the better.

After the presentation, we sat down with a few Coinbase executives, including Katherine Johnson, who serves as Director of Compliance Regulation at Coinbase and also helped launch the People of Color ERG. Katherine had incredible insights in the world of cryptocurrency and regulation. After several conversations over the following months, we recruited Katherine to join the Storj Labs’ Board of Directors. We are absolutely thrilled to welcome Katherine to the team. Her expertise will be a huge help for us as we navigate the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency regulation, maintain our international growth, and continue to establish ourselves as the leader in transparency in token governance.

One of the biggest challenges in the emerging decentralization and blockchain landscapes is that we are venturing into uncharted legal and compliance territory. Having the expertise of someone like Katherine to help guide us through legal and regulatory hurdles will be extremely valuable as clarity unfolds from regulators world-wide. Katherine brings experience gained not only at Coinbase, but also from a distinguished career as an attorney, serving as counsel for organizations such as Ernst and Young, BNY Mellon, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan Chase. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School, and clerked for the US Courts in the influential Southern District of New York.

Our community has been appreciative of our transparency around our product, development, and other internal team endeavors, and our goal is to also be a leader in token governance and regulatory compliance. This is why we’ve outlined our policies around timelocked tokens, reported on our token treasury controls, and started issuing quarterly STORJ Token Balances and Flows Reports. We look forward to leveraging the talents of Katherine to help us achieve our transparency goals (and much more) in the years to come.

In her role at Coinbase, Katherine has supported the company as it went through a period of hyper growth. During this time, the company underwent a broad reorganization, rolled out its exchange across several new countries, and launched new tools and services for customers, all while ensuring the company complies with local and global regulations.

This experience will be a huge support to the Storj team as we launch our new V3 network into production this fall, welcome our partners and customers to the platform, and grow to surpass the size of our previous network, which scaled to 150 petabytes of data stored across nodes in more than 180 countries and territories.

We welcome Katherine to the Storj team and look forward to utilizing her many talents as we make a decentralized future a reality.