coindesk.com
$NEAR Foundation CEO Marieke Flament has stepped down after two years in her role running the organization behind the $NEAR protocol ($NEAR).
Chris Donovan, the foundation’s general counsel, will take her place, according to a Thursday blog post. Flament will stay on as a strategic adviser to Donovan until the end of the year. Flament will remain at the foundation in a council board role.
“When I joined two years ago, $NEAR had around 50,000 users, and now we have over 2.5 million daily active users,” Flament said in an interview with CoinDesk. She added that Donovan is well-suited to the CEO role now given “the current regulatory landscape.” She added: “We are not the only ecosystem making a move like that.”
The $NEAR protocol currently ranks 34th in terms of total value locked (TVL), a measure of the amount of money stashed in a given blockchain ecosystem, according to data from DefiLlama.
In September 2022, the $NEAR Foundation launched a $100 million venture capital fund and venture lab in partnership with Caerus Ventures.