ILIJA

My main objective is to contribute to Cardano success, mainly from the growth, adoption, business and governance angle.

I have been a Cardano fan since 2020, actively participating since the end of ITN in all manner of activities. Acting closely as an Catalyst assessor/advisor and veteran assessor/advisor since Fund2.

Currently COO of NuNet, leading the OPS of a deep tech startup. I have helped steer NuNet to successfully growing up to 30+ people and reaching a point of transitioning from pure R&D focus to the rapid growth, with deployment on Cardano.

With over 15 years of experience in managing major infrastructure, power, and manufacturing projects, I want to bring this wealth of knowledge to the blockchain world. My formal education is in engineering, including an MSc in Civil Engineering and a certification in Executive Management and Leadership from MIT Sloan. Experience and formal education is a strong foundation for DRep role in the rapidly evolving blockchain industry.

I want to be able to closely monitor the work of the governance groups and encourage responsible governance and conservative treasury management. I believe we are at the beginning of the new major technological revolution, and Cardano is well positioned to take the lead there. The revolution will be in part with AI + blockchain + DePIN narrative and that is my personal major interest.

My biggest fear for Cardano growth and adoption is unsupervised and unopposed spending of the treasury without 3rd party oversight. This could lead to depletion of the funds needed to nurture the growth in decades to come. Since I believe Cardano has the best chance to be the L1 of choice for many institutions, I have decided to bring my 15+ years of corporate management experience to the governance efforts to contribute in making it so.

Having a strong STEM engineering background, coupled with actual management in major complex real world projects rounds the wisdom needed for this role. Overall exceptional analytical and logical decision making skills honed in physical business and transferred to Catalyst.

Now, as a COO of a blockchain based deep tech startup I possess a wealth of knowledge from digital and physical world which I want to bring to the Cardano governance.

Being at the age of 44, I consider this a nice balance between enough of life experience and life energy for executing complex oversight.