Much like its Founder, CEO, and Lead Architect Jed Grant, the Peer Mountain team boasts a wide range of talent and knowledge in the IT space, and a genuine desire to help others. These attributes have been vital to the development of a blockchain-based ecosystem that does more than simplify and protect our transactions with businesses, institutions, and each other — it respects a basic human right to privacy, and it puts our identities back in our control.

These are two concerns are highly personal to Jed: in 2010, he was the victim of identity theft.

Fraudsters forged credit check consent forms to get the personal and financial information of thousands of people, including Jed. Using his social security numbers and credit history account details, they charged tens of thousands of dollars to Jed’s credit cards and filed fake US tax returns to get illegal refunds in his name.

Since then, identity thieves have become more sophisticated, upgrading from crude paper-based scams to hacking their way into centralized data storage, processing, and transmission systems.

As a financial and technical security professional, Jed has always been aware of the inherent risks of centralized systems. Personal and professional experience motivated him to establish Peer Mountain, the world’s only decentralized identity protection, trust, and compliance ecosystem.

Originally from California, Jed moved to Paris in the late 80s to work as a programmer analyst for a software company that supplied its products to major French companies and NATO. After returning to the US to complete his computer science degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he moved to the former Czechoslovakia, where he met his wife. He then moved to Luxembourg, where he worked as a civilian officer with NATO, managing an IT section that delivered a full spectrum of IT services, built up a data center, provided training, developed applications, and launched a helpdesk.

In 2008, Jed founded Sandstone, a provider of bespoke enhanced due diligence (EDD) solutions for personal and private intelligence agencies. In 2009, he set up the Institute for Global Financial Integrity, a non-profit thought leadership forum that was chaired until recently by Jacques Santer, former President of the European Commission, now chaired by Patrick Zurstraussen, former financier and banker from Luxembourg.

Jed also sits on the Board of Directors of the American Chamber of Commerce, and heads up its New Business and Entrepreneurship Committee. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Luxembourg, where he lectures on compliance in the Masters and Wealth Mgmt program.

In addition, Peer Mountain’s tireless CEO is a board member and chair of the governance group for Infrachain, a new initiative sponsored by Ministry of State and a number of private corporations to develop a blockchain infrastructure that can be trusted to run applications in a trusted environment, meaning that the blockchain operators are neutral, independent, and trusted so that apps can be run using multiple parties in a trusted manner.

At each step of his career, Jed has designed, developed, implemented, and improved technology and processes that are still in use today. For the last decade, he has focused on practical technology-driven Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), and EDD.