Photo: Richard Kastelein

Anyone who is in the ICO business probably knows him by now: Richard Kastelein. He’s been an advisor for lots of successful startups (ever heard of Bancor?), attends a great amount of blockchain events and has written more than 1900 articles as founder and publisher of Blockchain News. He has about 20 finished blockchain projects under his belt and is on the advisory board of some 20 more, which earned him a position as one of the most trusted reviewers of ICOs.

As iCasting’s advisor Richard has been an amazing help connecting us to a network of people in the industry. He has helped us to get pick out the worthwhile events. He’s all around our go-to guy when it comes to marketing and gaining visibility in the crypto world. However, at the start his interests weren’t surrounding cryptocurrencies at all.

After setting off to the Netherlands at 18 from his home country Canada, the now dual-citizen Richard started out working for his uncle shoveling coal. Unable to speak the language, he mainly got along with a few men from St. Maarten and decided to fly across the Atlantic on their suggestion. After a while it was there that he found the sailers life through a Swedish crew heading back off to Europe, which marked the start of his love for the sea. From this trip onwards Richard went to join every crew he could. On his journeys all across the globe he started writing “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Seas”, a series published in various magazines. He got the taste for writing and decided after a few years of sailing that he wanted to go back to college in Canada and improve himself as a journalist.

As a journalist Richard has written for numerous organizations and eventually found himself getting pulled into the tech world. While working for an open-source project he met with the running president of the first Dutch blockchain party and got his first contact with cryptocurrencies. Although he wasn’t very interested in the currencies themselves, he did have a fascination for the blockchain technology and wanted to explore all the possibilities of it. This was what set Richard off to start Blockchain News. The platform remained a hobby for the first few years until the blockchain-journalist’s opinion amounted such a value that startups wanted to start advertising on his website. This moved him to set up his own consulting company, which gained momentum through ads on his website. It was only a few steps from this to teaching an online Ph.D. class, getting asked to be CMO for an ICO and eventually one of the leading advisors in the ICO market.

Richard has been our advisor since the start of our blockchain development. It’s no wonder he is one of the most valued people in blockchain. Thanks to his knowledge we have gained great insights into all kinds of aspects of the industry. If you want to know more about Richard’s milestones, you can read his bio on Blockchain News or take a look at his LinkedIn profile linked below.

http://www.the-blockchain.com/author/richard-kastelein/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/expathos/