Marieke Flament, CEO of the NEAR Foundation – creators of the NEAR Protocol layer-1 blockchain – has handed in her notice.
It’s been reported that the NEAR Foundation treasury expanded to approximately $350million under Flament’s direction.
Replacing her as CEO is Chris Donovan, the NEAR Foundation’s general counsel.
In her personal message today, Flament detailed that, for the past two years, NEAR Protocol’s daily active user count grew from 50k to three million, and its Twitter (X) followers progressed from 200k to more than two million “thanks to over 2,000 pieces of press coverage”.
Partnerships inked by NEAR in this time include SWEAT, Playember, Circle, Ledger, Alibaba, Amazon, Google, KPMG, Cosmose AI, SailGP, The Littles, PipeFlare, Shemaroo, Kakao Games, Inven/Vortex and Netmarble/Marblex in Korea.
While there was no particular reason given for her departure, Flament said today: “All good things come to an end – and after a wild (very wild!) two years as CEO of NEAR Foundation, I have decided to step down and leave space for the next evolution of the NEAR Foundation, which will be led by Chris Donovan.
“I will continue my NEAR journey as an active and committed NEAR Foundation Council member, an advisor to Chris, a huge ecosystem advocate and hopefully a proud member of the NEAR Digital Collective (shameless plug – vote for me!). I am excited to continue having an impact and to continue contributing to NEAR.
“I am very proud of what has been achieved by the NEAR Foundation team for the ecosystem in an incredibly challenging environment.
“Two years ago, I had never heard of NEAR. Upon doing a bit of research and after several conversations it became clear that NEAR had a tremendous potential – fantastic tech, a diverse and vibrant community and a world of open possibilities, and so I joined.”
She concluded: “NEAR is in a very strong position – no other ecosystem is as well financed, nor has the decentralized governance that we have. We played the long game, away from FUD and FOMO, and it is starting to pay off.”
NEAR is currently the 40th-largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $1.06billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
