Meet the Team — Ben & Mikael
Originally posted 19th March 2021 Radixdlt.com/blog
One of the questions we often get asked is “Who are the people working at Radix?”
The Radix team is composed of passionate, multi-talented, and hardworking individuals from around the world. In this blog series, we introduce them two at a time (Check out the previous post with Russell & Raul).
Today we sat down with Ben and Mikael, and asked them about their experience, expertise, and critically, what makes them so excited about Radix.
Ben Fargher — Head of Partnerships — Radix DLT
Ben has a professional background in the governance, audit, risk management and regulation of financial technology. He’s worked with clients across retail banking, investment banking and markets, insurance, investment management, and fintech — with a specialism in payments systems and financial market infrastructure (FMI), which is the plumbing that connects financial entities together.
He’s keen to apply his professional experience to help Radix grow from cutting-edge but as-yet unproven technology, to be the platform that takes DeFi mainstream.
Ben joined Radix as Head of Partnerships, and has already taken on important projects — supporting node-runners for the Betanet, and making connections with DeFi developers.
We asked Ben a little more about his role below:
I was originally attracted to Radix by Dan’s vision.
Bitcoin provided the world with a public, decentralized, permissionless, trustless and censorship-resistant form of programmable money. But what it lacked was the ability to scale — at a baseline structural level. Dan and the team’s unwavering integrity to solving that foundational problem — spurning any form of premature release that could have made them generational wealth — is what makes Radix sui-generis, one of a kind. I can’t think of any other project that has devoted as much as eight years — without compromise — to solving this problem. You can read more on Dan and Radix’s journey here.
But the very real problems in finance today — being inefficient, opaque, controlled and accessed by only the few — are not solved by a scalable distributed ledger alone. That mantle falls on a new generation of builders who are developing applications that fundamentally re-architect how finance works through the powers of DeFi. Our focus is to endow them with the tools to build fast without breaking things; reward those that make it better; and to provide an underlying infrastructure that is as friction-free as possible. You can read more on how the Radix Engine v2, Scrypto, the component catalog, and developer royalties make this possible here.
So where do I come in? My role is to help jumpstart our ecosystem. As a platform, the value we bring is proportional to the square of our network — see Metcalfe’s law. That means it’s absolutely vital that we attract the best partners to build on or integrate with Radix. That includes not only DeFi dApps, but partners across the wider ecosystem — such as exchanges, wallets, oracles, custodians, and so forth.
If any of you have any great ideas as to how we do this — from both a strategic perspective, but also in terms of any projects you may be involved with or could connect us to — I’d love to hear from you. Being a decentralized platform, we’re only as strong as our community, so please hit me up on Telegram or Discord and we can take it from there.
Speaking of community…
Mikael Perttula — Head of Community — Radix DLT
Mikael was part of the original 2013 Bitcoin Meetup group in Finland, and has been a crypto enthusiast since. After realizing that there is more to the space than Bitcoin, he fell deep down the rabbit hole from there, and started reading everything he could obsessively about the different technologies, and spent thousands of hours in different crypto communities.
Mikael’s professional background involves working in marketing, and customer & partner-facing roles in financial services and mobile learning. He says taking the leap to full-time crypto is the best decision he’s ever made (second to getting a dog).
Mikael joined Radix in October as our Head of Community and has quickly become one of the go-to people on the team to ask about anything that’s happening in the industry, within the Radix community, or outside it.
We asked Mikael a little more about his role below:
The community is the heart and soul of any public DLT project, and a strong community drastically improves the long-term success of the project. The best communities are forged by the tireless efforts of individuals pushing together as a team towards a shared strategic vision.
Radix shines on this front — it already has a strong communal foundation and unique culture that the community and team members have built over the years. As cheesy as it might sound, I feel honoured to be standing on the shoulders of giants (Peachy, Maciej, and others). I’m equally honoured and grateful about the new warriors contributing, helping new members settle in, and bringing additional value selflessly.
We’re all driven by the same passion for the disruptive potential of this technology, and we’re with Radix as we believe it’s got a real shot in becoming the Layer-1 protocol of choice for the users and builders of DeFi (and beyond).
My main priorities are to build, grow, and help manage the communities of Radix globally. These include the primary channels on Telegram, Discord, Reddit, and other socials, as well as offline too. I work as a bridge between the community, and the wider Radix team — always pushing for feedback and constructive ideas both ways. I use quantitative and qualitative data to make sure we’re going in the right direction. I research and integrate the best practices of other open source communities. In summary, I do my best to improve our communities, help our members succeed, and promote the growth of the channels.
In football, there is a phrase “the 12th man” meaning that a team’s home supporters are one additional player to the normal 11 players. Their presence encourages and motivates the team to perform better or score goals. I believe that in Radix’s case this is partly false — we have an entire battalion of Radvocates with us on the field.
Everyone working on Radix is pleased to welcome both Ben & Mikael to the team. If you are interested in joining Radix, you can find open positions on our careers page, where we have multiple positions currently open: https://www.radixdlt.com/careers/.
