Hi everyone, we’re happy to announce that @dodger is the ZF’s new executive director. Here’s our blog post below with some more detail:
The Zcash Foundation is very excited to welcome Jack Gavigan as its new Executive Director.
With over ten years of experience in finance, and four years at the Electric Coin Company, Jack’s deep knowledge of Zcash, and his alignment with the Foundation’s values makes him the ideal person to guide the Zcash Foundation into its preschool years.
The Foundation has spent its first three years establishing itself as a key member of the Zcash ecosystem, and now Jack will lead the organization as it continues its mission building and supporting the deployment of decentralized, censorship-resistant, financial privacy infrastructure.
Jack is eager to build on the Foundation’s strategy and roadmap of growing user adoption. He looks forward to working with the Foundation’s talented engineering team with a view to launching the Zebra zcash node implementation later this year, to provide a built-from-scratch alternative to Zcashd.
Jack’s arrival at the Zcash Foundation marks the conclusion of a months-long executive search process carried out by the board and staff. We thank Antonie Hodge for serving as interim executive director during this time.
Some background on Jack: Jack has a background in financial technology. He spent over a decade working on trading systems at major financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley (where he also spent a year as a trader). He became an advisor to the Electric Coin Company in early 2016, and joined the company as COO shortly before the launch of Zcash in October 2016. He relinquished the role of COO in 2018, and his recent focus has been on regulatory relations.
In the years that we’ve worked together, he has filled many different roles successfully. He led our contract with J.P. Morgan, performed project management on the extremely challenging but ultimately successful Sapling project, executed certain high-stakes operational security processes successfully, served on the leadership team that reports to me personally, and recently has been Zcash’s point man on meeting with and educating regulators worldwide, including Financial Action Task Force, New York Department of Financial Services, Monetary Authority of Singapore, and more. And that’s only a partial list of his contributions.
Everyone at ECC is sad to see Jack go. I’m proud that one of ECC alumni is now taking up such a complex and important leadership role as Executive Director at the Zcash Foundation. I’m looking forward to working with Jack in his new role as the leader of the Zcash Foundation in support of our shared mission.
Thank you all, especially Antonie who has done an excellent job keeping things running smoothly for the past few months.
It’s a very bittersweet feeling to be leaving the team I’ve been part of for more than four years (nearly five if you count the time I spent as an advisor before I joined ECC full-time) but I’m looking forward to continuing to work with them - albeit in a different capacity - towards our shared goals.
For the record, I do not hold equity in ECC, and, as of close of business last Friday, I no longer have any business or employment relationships with ECC.
