Brian Avello Joins the Iron Fish Foundation Board
Elena Nadolinski
CEO & Founder @ Iron Fish
We are excited to announce that Brian Avello has joined the Iron Fish Foundation Board! Brian joins the Foundation Board following his time as General Counsel for the Maker Foundation and currently serving as a board member at the Optimism Foundation.
Iron Fish Foundation
The Iron Fish Foundation is an entity that supports and grows the Iron Fish ecosystem. Our goal is to strengthen the community and get the best minds of crypto involved with the project to make Iron Fish the chain-agnostic privacy solution for crypto. We are extremely honored and excited to welcome Brian Avello as our first external Board member.
Brian’s journey in crypto started in early 2016. He was drawn to crypto by following some of the most intelligent people he’s ever met—the early Maker founders and contributors—and has stayed to work alongside brilliant teams from multiple projects, including the Maker Foundation, Superrare, and now the Optimism Foundation. Throughout his journey he has worked with projects that address a core opportunity in the ecosystem at large: from stablecoins (Maker) to scalability (Optimism), and now to privacy with Iron Fish. Brian believes privacy is critical to the future of crypto, and sees Iron Fish as a pivotal solution in the market. His interest in Iron Fish stems from the network’s unique capabilities and goals, including chain-agnostic privacy, private stablecoins, and more.
Welcome Brian Avello - we’re excited to have you join Iron Fish!
A Note from Brian Avello
Hi All,
My name is Brian Avello. I wanted to give you all some background on how I came to crypto and, eventually, Iron Fish.
About me:
I’ve had a peculiar journey into and through crypto over the last few years. Honestly, it was largely a matter of being married to the right person and living in the right place at the right time (New York City in 2016)
Through my wife’s friend and former colleague, I came to know Nikolai Mushegian, co-founder of Maker and one of the industry’s quiet geniuses who went on to contribute more significantly to our space than most, if not all, people realize. Working with him as my first crypto legal client and his team at DappHub brought me to the center of a small but growing group of people building on Ethereum in early 2016. From that vantage point, I represented a number of other projects and entrepreneurs, from the earliest NFT exchanges to the people trying to figure out how to invest in all this stuff. Several years later, I took the helm as General Counsel for the Maker Foundation, and there I stayed until we dissolved the Foundation and I joined some old Maker colleagues to start the UDHC, an early-stage investment fund focused on DeFi.
I am also proud to sit on the boards of a few other projects and companies, from the Optimism Foundation (leading L2) to Nayms (decentralized insurance) and Oasis Pro (a digital asset investment bank and ATS).
Anyway, my crypto career has had more high points than I can describe and the latest one was meeting Elena and her team and learning about Iron Fish. I am honored to join the board at the Iron Fish Foundation, and I will do my best to ensure that Elena’s and her team’s vision for a privacy-focused L1 linking users and assets from any and all other blockchains is as successful as it is ambitious.
Thanks for having me.
Join the Iron Fish community 🏃🐟
Elena Nadolinski
CEO & Founder @ Iron Fish
Elena is the Founder and CEO of Iron Fish — previously worked at Airbnb, Tilt, and Microsoft. Fell down the cryptocurrency rabbit hole in 2017. Really didn't want her insurance to know she eats pizza.