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Centre Consortium Hires Six Employees, Including Former Circle, PwC Executives
The new hires create a pathway for Centre to expand membership beyond just Circle and Coinbase.
Updated May 11, 2023, 4:12 p.m. Published Aug 30, 2021, 1:00 p.m.
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The Centre consortium, the Coinbase- and Circle-founded project that oversees the USDC stablecoin, is becoming a more independent organization with the hiring of three C-suite and three executive positions.
From December 2020 until March, Centre CEO David Puth was the only Centre employee and the consortium was run by its founding companies. (Circle co-founder Sean Neville served as an adviser to Puth.) The new hires will allow Centre to open its membership to organizations other than Circle and Coinbase.
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“I would venture comfortably that we’ve been operational as a company for the last four or five months.” Puth said. “I could almost say we’ve been operational as a company since I joined in December, but what this has really enabled us to do is respond directly to the community of users, both proactively and reactively. This really enables us to lay the groundwork for building the Centre consortium that we look forward to getting underway hopefully later this year.”
The new hires include:
- Former PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) partner John Shipman joins as chief commercial officer. In the past he’s worked on stablecoin projects at Barclays, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Standard Chartered Bank. He’s also advised central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects in the U.K., Singapore, South Africa and Indonesia.
- Former Circle Chief Compliance Officer Mark duBose joins Centre as chief risk and compliance officer.
- Former Robin Hood Foundation Chief Financial Officer Beth Zolkind joins Centre as chief financial officer to look over the budget and financial soundness of USDC.
- Chad Richman, a former associate in Fenwick & West’s blockchain practice, joins as senior counsel.
- Kevin Mills, an MBA student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, joins as graduate project manager after several years in consulting and institutional investment management.
CORRECTION (Aug. 30, 22:04 UTC): An earlier version of this article stated that Zolkind was formerly the CFO of Robinhood. She was formerly the CFO of the Robin Hood Foundation.
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