CIO and Head of DeFi at a Frankfurt fintech

From the start of 2022 to October 2024 I worked at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital, which sells institutional investors the infrastructure to analyze, trade and manage digital assets. I joined as Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations and was Chief Information Officer from January 2023.

Node operations for an oracle network, 2022

From my first day I was responsible for the operation of the blockchain infrastructure in several data centers. The company was a node operator in an oracle network that delivers market data to smart contracts, above all to decentralized exchanges, and it ran nodes for protocols such as Ethereum and Avalanche.

I took over the operation and the internal documentation of that price data network. I managed the servers hands-on, built up the node operations team and improved performance. Later I moved the infrastructure from Azure to another cloud provider and set up a failover infrastructure. The project page is Node operations and a cloud migration.

A market-data product, summer 2022

Smart contracts need reliable price data, and so do institutional market participants. In summer 2022 I created a new product with colleagues from several teams: real-time and historical trading data on hundreds of liquid and illiquid digital assets, delivered over WebSocket and RPC endpoints for commercial use.

I was responsible for the conception, the coordination and the rollout. I designed the product marketing and talked to decision-makers at stock exchanges and banks. I onboarded institutional and professional customers and the cooperation partners that came with them. The project page is Real-time market data.

Chief Information Officer from January 2023

As CIO I had disciplinary responsibility for business-critical teams, and I coordinated people from four of them: development, infrastructure, product and sales. I was responsible for the budgets and for the management of information technology. I developed and communicated the product vision and carried it through to the launch of financial products. Growth and marketing were part of the role.

One of my goals was to explain why institutional users need compliant market data on digital assets as regulatory pressure grows. Part of the role was to describe technically complex matters in simple words.

Procuration in May 2023

In May 2023 I received procuration. It authorized me to represent the company in all judicial and extrajudicial transactions and legal acts that the operation of the business entails.

Contracts for the product and for partners

In 2023 I helped to write the legal documents of the market-data product: the terms and conditions, the service and price definitions, the market data manifest and the methodologies for the API endpoints. Regulatory and business compliance decide whether banks and asset managers can use such a product, so the clauses had to hold legally and stay readable.

I also created and updated the legal framework of the partner program, through which partners earn by recommending the company’s services to third parties. I worked on usage license agreements for the company’s intellectual property, and I designed agreements with an oracle network, a crypto exchange, banks and stock exchanges.

My contract work at other stations is on Publications, press and committees. The stations before and after this one are on Career.