Today, we’re excited to welcome Rick Schlesinger, Warrick FitzGerald and William (Buddy) Deck, to the AIKON team. The three join AIKON after leading EOSIO and other blockchain initiatives at Block.one. The team members were also part of the founding team behind EOS New York, one of the leading block producers on the EOS Network at inception.
These exceptional leaders join AIKON at a time of extreme customer and product-led growth for the company. This news comes hot on the heels of AIKON’s customer announcements that SpiderDAO and RedFOX Labs are tapping ORE ID for their entire ecosystems — including RedFOX Labs’ newest play-to-earn game, KOGS:SLAM — creating over 30,000 new ORE ID accounts in just 3 months. As well as a new ORE Vault feature allowing businesses to securely manage, store and create NFTs through an OpenSea integration and multi-signature user experience.
“Rick’s entrepreneurial mindset, vision for a decentralized world and deep understanding of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) provide an invaluable perspective to AIKON — especially as we look to expand ORE ID and ORE Vault’s functionality to meet the industry’s rapidly growing needs. Paired with Warrick and Buddy’s engineering expertise, extensive knowledge and success building teams at industry-leading companies, this is a huge step forward for AIKON,” explains AIKON CEO and ORE Core Contributor Marc Blinder.
Scaling for Today’s — and Tomorrow’s — DAO Needs
DAOs are poised to dominate in 2022. We expect more businesses, non-governmental organizations and nonprofits to form DAOs this year and AIKON is ensuring their needs are met with the current and future features of ORE ID and ORE Vault. This is where AIKON’s new Head of Strategy, Rick Schlesinger, comes into play.
Rick is a serial entrepreneur and founder at his core. Prior to AIKON, he led Digital Asset Product at the exchange Bullish and deepened the engagement with public blockchains as SVP at Block.one. As co-founder of EOS New York, Rick led the EOS block production business strategy and oversaw operations across capital investments, finance and legal. Prior, he had a successful career in management consulting, advising Fortune 500 companies on business strategy and M&A.
Rick is a student of economics and libertarian philosophy and envisions that a blockchain-enabled world will create freer societies, institutions and people — fitting in well with his vision for long-term DAO support through AIKON and the Open Rights Exchange (ORE) Network.
“In the next three to five years, I see AIKON as the marquee DAO platform integrating DAO tools into one easy-to-use platform. The explosive opportunity is written on the wall. We have the user-friendly tools already in place to support DAOs, bolstered by the cross-chain blockchain assets, ORE Network, and the ORE ($ORE) Token,” explains Rick.”
He continues, “I’m excited that the engineering talent from EOS New York is staying together and working on innovative projects in the DAO space with AIKON. I’m happy to be part of a startup that has the drive and tenacity to go after and experiment with cutting-edge technology.”
Blockchain Leaders Bolster AIKON’s Engineering Roster
Warrick brings 25+ years of entrepreneurial knowledge and engineering expertise to AIKON as its Director of Engineering. His career has focused on developing enterprise solutions for companies including eBay and Bank of America. Also a serial entrepreneur, Warrick co-founded and led startups as CTO and COO and is a self-proclaimed advocate for cybersecurity and compliance.
“AIKON is solving real, known problems in the blockchain and crypto industry that are blocking businesses and consumers from using this powerful technology. There are so many exciting, but disconnected innovations in this space — AIKON’s solutions are the bridge for this fragmented user experience gap,” says Warrick. “AIKON is creating the Internet’s ‘Netscape moment’ for blockchain.”
AIKON’s Director of Infrastructure, Buddy Deck, will be the driving force behind the management and continuous improvement of the technology underpinning AIKON’s solutions. As the former Blockchain Engineering Manager at Block.one, he has the expertise and knowledge of improving the infrastructure for decentralized services. Prior, Buddy cut his teeth in blockchain at EOS New York as the Head of Block Production, building out the infrastructure required to make EOS New York a leading Block Producer.
“The opportunity to further develop the ORE Network initially drew me to the role at AIKON. I firmly believe that there won’t be one network to rule them all, and with ORE Network as the connector between chains, there is real potential here to create more innovative products. I love being able to work with Warrick and Rick again and I believe the AIKON team has already done outstanding work to date — adding more talent will only increase the ability to do more fantastic work,” shares Buddy.
Building the Future
This news is just the start of what to expect in 2022 and beyond as we continue to scale our product offerings and team.
We’re building for the decentralized future. Interested in joining the team? Contact us today.
About AIKON
Blockchain and crypto are technologically complex. AIKON makes it simple. We’ve built a suite of intuitive products built on the ORE Network for enterprise companies looking to provide a seamless user experience that works cross-chain with Algorand, Ethereum, EOS and more.
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About the Open Rights Foundation
Built in partnership with AIKON, the Open Rights Exchange is built to be simple to use and compatible with all chains. A single password — not a key — is provided as the entry to not just the Open Rights Exchange, but to all other chains including Ethereum, Polygon, Algorand and EOS — with even more chains being added every quarter.