Stellar Hire Former Mozilla Executive As CEO

The Chief Operating Officer at the Mozilla web browser has officially entered the cryptocurrency space.

Based in the San Francisco area, Denelle Dixon has been working at Mozilla for almost seven years working her way up the ranks starting as a Associate General Counsel in 2012. Now, Dixon has joined the Stellar Development Foundation as CEO of the non-profit organisation which promotes the top ten cryptocurrency, Stellar Lumens. Jed McCaleb is who Dixon will be replacing who has moved on to the role of the chief architect in which he’ll focus on protocol growth and adoption strategies.

Dixon has said in a statement that her goal is to “listen, learn, support and do. I want to help move Stellar to the place it seeks to be, and that’s how it starts. More to come once I start.” Following on from this she said, “this is my first role in the crypto space officially. It’s awesome and exciting.”

McCaleb has said in a press release that Dixon’s “long experience leading operations and business at Mozilla, as well as her work on the policy side, with advocacy around Open Internet and encryption and privacy, will be indispensable to SDF in the coming years.”

Dixon has already shown a penchant for cypherpunk innovation when she encouraged Mozilla to launch the data-protecting browser extension called Facebook Container within hours of the social media platform’s Cambridge Analytica data-sharing scandal hitting the newsstands.

Dixon posted a blog post on Medium yesterday (14th March) explaining why she is joining Stellar saying, “as Mozilla’s COO, I led the organization’s ongoing fight for Net Neutrality. I led the global effort to ensure that people can control their personal data.” In the post, she emphasised how she wants to assist the foundation partner with commercial entities with sacrificing their “core mission”.

It seems that this is a good time to join the Stellar Foundation as earlier this week we saw Coinbase list XLM on its institutional Coinbase Pro offering. Furthermore, Stellar is a big partner of IBM which works on stablecoin projects running on top of the blockchain.

A nice touch by Dixon was when she said, “among blockchains, Stellar is uniquely positioned to connect to existing payment infrastructure.”