Leading #Blockchain innovator #Consensys continues to ramp up its role in shaping the future of financial services and capital markets in Africa with the recruitment of #fintech veteran Ian Bessarabia. He joins the team as Head of South African Operations to support the implementation of enterprise Blockchain solution.
Bessarabia has been working in fintech for 20 years, and has managed operations teams, project implementations and market-driven initiatives in an array of countries and across industry. He is best known in African and global capital markets for his work as Market Development Lead – Fixed Income, Foreign Exchange and Blockchain – Africa at Thomson Reuters and previously as Business Development Manager at SWIFT.

ConsenSys is a worldwide venture production studio that specialises in building decentralised applications (DApps), enterprise solutions and various developer tools for Blockchain ecosystems, focused primarily on Ethereum. Powered by smart contracts, and secured through encryption, the applications provide the benefits of transparency, auditability, and immutability that are unique to solutions based on blockchain.
In a recent post on LinkedIn Bessarabia wrote: “Blockchain has the power to transform the way businesses share information and deliver services. However, this relatively new technology needs to demonstrate clear value to businesses before it builds enough trust to go mainstream.
In a recent press release Bessarabia adds: “Much time has been spent analysing and challenging the underlying technology, and there is a pressing need to shift the thinking into a tangible business narrative, and pragmatic adoption. Expansion within the local financial sector will see our marketplace becoming Blockchain enabled. The idea is that every asset bought or sold would be on the ledger”.

Monica Singer, South Africa Lead at ConsenSys, recruited him: “It provides me tremendous pleasure to take someone with the abilities and experience as Ian on board. We are on such an incredibly exciting journey and having Ian provide his input is a real boon for us.”
According to the press release: “(Ian) thrives on mentoring start-ups and early-stage initiatives looking at deploying technology for social good. As an ethical protagonist, he is also a participant of the Ethics and Governance Think Tank, run by The University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science” He is on the South African Financial Blockchain Consortium (SAFBC), a group aimed at educating and bringing the benefits of Blockchain to the industry for the benefit of the entire country.

What is Ethereum?
According to the Ethereum website it’s a way to build “unstoppable applications”:
“Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.
“These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property.
“This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middleman or counterparty risk.”