I’m thrilled to announce that my friend and advisor Dr. Chris Dark has joined OST as co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer. Chris will lead all of OST’s go-to-market operations — critical to our strategy of building OST hand-in-hand with high growth companies around the world.

OST Commercial Strategy

OST is building essential blockchain infrastructure and tools to enable businesses with tens of millions of users to transform their communities into dynamic ecosystems.

OST builds on OpenST “Open Simple Token,” the protocol that enables businesses to launch their own Branded Tokens (e.g. “Unsplash token” or “LGBT token” or “Your Brand’s Token”) on public OpenST utility blockchains backed by staking the OST token on public Ethereum. This critical blockchain infrastructure allows brands to have their own crypto economy (importantly, leveraging their own brand) minus the legal, regulatory, and technical challenges with moving to blockchain on their own.

The OpenST utility chains are scalable to Internet-grade transaction volumes, with economic finality occurring on public Ethereum. OST provides partners with software solutions for Token Rules, Key Management, Pricing, Wallets, Identity & KYC/AML — via robust developer APIs and SDKs; enabling companies to inject blockchain tokenization into their apps by just adding a few lines of code (akin to integrating Stripe for old-world payments).

Our strategy is to build OST hand-in-hand with the developer community, so that OST technology meets the real needs of businesses.

This strategy is working.

73 development teams have already integrated early versions of OST-powered Branded Tokens into their apps, and we expect hundreds more to do the same over the next couple months as we add more enhancements and push towards launching OST on mainnet later this year.

OST’s signed partners already combine for many more users than the entire number of current crypto wallet owners in the world.

Our sights are squarely set on being the project that truly brings blockchain to the mainstream, by working with the world’s largest apps and delivering solutions that accelerate their businesses.

Building A World Class OST Commercial Team

Executing on our customer-centric approach to blockchain requires a world-class commercial team.

As a founding board member of the OpenST Foundation, Chris Dark has already been helping lead the charge on cultivating partnerships with companies and projects building on OpenST.

Chris has now joined the OST Company as Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer. In this capacity Chris is responsible for all facets of OST’s global go-to-market plans. Chris leads teams of OST Business Development Professionals and Blockchain Strategy Consultants in Berlin, New York, and Hong Kong. The OST Business Development team pitches and signs up partners to work with OST. The OST Blockchain Strategy Consultants work with our signed partners to plan, model, and implement their token economies.

About Chris Dark

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Chris since 2012 when he was a venture capitalist at Atomico, which invested in one of my prior companies. Chris is one of the few (very rare) people I know who are equally adept at disruptive technology, business strategy, customer empathy, business development, and managing global teams. A PhD in Superconductors from Oxford, Chris can segue seamlessly from atomic swaps, to auxiliary state roots, to token economic theory, to modelling demand for non-fungible tokens — without breaking a sweat.

Based in Hong Kong, Chris most recently served as President International at C2FO, the world’s leading working capital marketplace. Since its first transaction in May 2010, C2FO has generated more than $139 billion in working capital flow volume and more than 525 million days of accelerated payment. Chris originally joined C2FO to head International based in London. He moved to Hong Kong in 2015 to focus on Greater China and Indian markets; C2FO is now the world’s largest non-bank provider of working capital, and has raised $200 million. Chris will continue to support C2FO in an advisory capacity as Vice-Chairman APAC.

Over the past few years Chris has also become a leading blockchain evangelist. In addition to serving on the board of OpenST since September 2017, Chris has also been an Advisor to Kenetic Capital, a Hong Kong based blockchain technology and investment platform.

Chris also serves as an Advisor to Oriente, a leading online consumer finance provider in SE Asia.

Prior to joining C2FO, from 2010 to 2014 Chris was a VC at Atomico, one of Europe’s largest venture capital firms, with a particular focus on mobile games, including investments in Supercell (sold to Softbank) and Rovio ($1B IPO).

Chris was also an early pioneer in eSports, founding several eSports websites, including GameReplays.org, at the time one of the first and largest eSports sites outside of Korea.

We’re thankful and humbled to have Chris joining OST full-time to run all of our customer and partner facing teams and operations. It’s a testament to the enormous potential of OST and OpenST that Chris decided to join OST in the critical role of Chief Commercial Officer. Chris can be best reached at chris@ost.com. You can also follow Chris on Twitter. He’ll also be writing more here on Medium soon for OST @ Chris Dark.