The blockchain technology platform based upon research by a team of computer scientists from the National University of Singapore has appointed the former head of APAC Marketing for Google Pay as their new CMO

Zilliqa, a blockchain technology company that is building a more secure and scalable platform for running the next generation of decentralized applications, has hired Yiling Ding, former Head of APAC Marketing for Google Pay, as the company’s CMO. Ding joins Zilliqa as the company begins ramping up marketing efforts in driving greater adoption of their technology platform.

“We are glad to have Yiling bring her incredible experience and talent to Zilliqa,” said Xinshu Dong, CEO of Zilliqa. “At Zilliqa we have always been working on hiring the best and brightest and Yiling is a perfect fit for our team. We’re very excited to begin working with her and applying her incredible marketing talent towards helping Zilliqa reach its potential as one of the leading blockchain technology platforms in the world.”

Ding, who speaks English, Japanese, and Chinese Mandarin fluently, has spent the past four years with Google Pay in the APAC region, with her recent role as Head of APAC Regional Marketing. During her time with Google she defined the marketing strategies for Google Pay in APAC and developed key partnerships while collaborating with Google product and engineering departments to double usage, amongst many other achievements. She holds a BA in Economics from Wellesley College.

“Zilliqa is backed by one of the most talented teams I have ever worked with,” said Yiling Ding. “The team has a high level of integrity and a focus on quality that is reflected in the technical achievements they have accomplished in such a short amount of time. I look forward to working closely with them and helping make their cutting-edge technology and vision a reality.”

Zilliqa is building a new, truly decentralized blockchain platform based on the technology of sharding that will solve the issue of scalability plaguing blockchains today by allowing transaction throughput to increase as more computers join the Zilliqa network. The original research for blockchain sharding was first proposed in an academic paper by members of the Zilliqa team in 2015 and the project has since built and launched their public testnet, the first blockchain in the world to implement sharding technology.

To make smart contract applications more secure and to completely avoid some of the most famous hacking events in blockchain history – namely the DAO hack and the Parity bug – Zilliqa has built and introduced a new, intermediate-level programming language for building smart contract applications called Scilla. Using this new, open source formal verification language, developers can much more easily build safe and secure, fully decentralized, smart contract applications that can run on Zilliqa’s high-speed blockchain platform.

Ding will join Zilliqa as the company is preparing for the public release of their platform and developing a suite of tools, applications, wallets to be used by the pioneer companies and developers using their technology. The company has stated that they will soon be announcing the initial recipients of the $5 million Zilliqa Ecosystem Grant for developers and teams that have started to #buildonZil.

Last week, Zilliqa announced a partnership with Infoteria Corporation to provide their technology to build blockchain applications that aim to improve business processes for some of the largest companies in Japan.