Kraken, which claims to be one of the world’s “longest standing” and most “trusted” crypto platforms, announced the appointment of Vishnu Patankar as Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
Patankar reportedly “brings over twenty years of technology expertise to Kraken and helped Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, and Groupon to scale products that impacted millions of clients worldwide.”
At Kraken, he will “lead the engineering team and work with the company’s leadership to deliver the next generation of products and services.”
His focus will be “on scaling the company into the most promising areas of crypto while maintaining its security-focused and client-obsessed ethos.”
David Ripley, Kraken CEO, said:
“Vishnu is a true leader in his field. He is a seasoned executive with deep expertise across all aspects of product development and tech leadership. He has built and led large, globally distributed engineering teams at some of the most innovative companies. He’s a strategic and technical leader who is well equipped to build and optimize Kraken’s technology to deliver the most secure and scalable product experiences. We’re thrilled to have him join our team.”
An engineering leader with strong business acumen, Patankar helped “build early scalable decentralized technologies by driving the development of products and infrastructure to service millions of clients around the world.”
Before joining Kraken, he was CTO “at StockX where he played an integral part in facilitating the company’s growth and launching its NFT offering.”
Patankar added:
“I recently realized that I’ve worked with some aspects of blockchain technology for the past sixteen years – more than half of my nearly 25 years of experience. First, in 2006, we invented the world’s first industrial strength key-value store at Amazon, called Dynamo. The project used Merkle trees to validate data integrity. Then, in 2022, I helped launch the NFT offering for StockX. In fact, I’ve been involved with some core underpinnings of cryptocurrency and the blockchain itself for years, sometimes without realizing it.”
He also mentioned:
“The inclusivity of decentralized technologies like the blockchain itself is powerful. Outside the primary use case of digital currency, there is potential in tokenization applications using the blockchain in real estate, collectibles, art, vehicle titling, identity, healthcare and watermarking of AI training data.”