SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2017 /PRNewswire/ – Blockstream, the leader in blockchain and related technologies, today announced a new member to its executive team. Starting this month, Samson Mow is joining Blockstream as its new Chief Strategy Officer. With the addition of this strategic hire, Blockstream continues on its path to bring even more cryptographic innovations to the market and to expand its global footprint. Having reached approximately $80 million (USD) after its Series A funding, Blockstream sees continued investor interest, especially from strategic partners who want to accelerate blockchain technology in Asia, where the company believes the path to its technologies in production will be the shortest.
“Samson’s skills and experience are exceptionally complementary to Blockstream, leveraging both his deep Bitcoin and startup expertise,” said Blockstream’s CEO, Dr. Adam Back. “As we accelerate and shift to the launch and marketing of our enterprise and consumer products, Samson will be undertaking a number of immediate strategic initiatives, including the establishment of Blockstream offices in China and Canada.”
Prior to joining Blockstream, Mow was the COO of BTCC (BTCChina), one of the largest digital currency exchanges and mining pools in the world. At BTCC, Mow led the company through a period of rapid growth and was responsible for the mining and exchange business units, along with operations, product development, and marketing.
“It’s an honor to join Blockstream and I’m very excited to be working alongside such an incredibly talented team,” said Mow. “There are many exciting projects underway at Blockstream, which each have the potential to revolutionize and disrupt multiple industries. We have an incredible opportunity to productize these innovations and collaborate with strategic partners to bring them to market.”
Mow is a well-known contributor in the Bitcoin community, advocating for the importance of decentralization and the need to prioritize security in protocol development. Working with others in the community, he is involved with the organization of the Scaling Bitcoin workshops and frequently lends his support to Bitcoin community events and initiatives.
In addition to his work in the Bitcoin sector, Mow is a game industry veteran and entrepreneur, with experience in both scaling up startups and managing large development teams. Mow was a director of production at Ubisoft where he spearheaded their expansion into Asian markets for web, social, and mobile games. Before Ubisoft, Mow was in charge of business development and operations at Sitemasher, a Vancouver based startup developing a SaaS platform for building websites and apps. Sitemasher was the winner of the Blue Sky Innovation Excellence Award from Microsoft and was later acquired by Salesforce.com.
Samson Mow holds a degree in business administration from Simon Fraser University and regularly features as a speaker and panelist in industry conferences.
To learn more about Blockstream, visit blockstream.com.
About Blockstream
Blockstream is the leader in interoperable blockchain technologies (sidechains), and applying innovative uses of cryptography for commercial privacy within blockchain infrastructures. Advancing the most mature, fully tested, and secure blockchain infrastructure in production with one of the most experienced teams in the industry, Blockstream partners with companies around the world that are seeking a path to production for digitized assets and new cryptographic financial systems. Learn more at https://blockstream.com/