Senior Coinbase Engineer Luke Youngblood Joins BENQI Protocol as a Strategic Advisor

Coinbase engineer Luke Youngblood will join BENQI Protocol as a strategic advisor.

BENQI Enlists Coinbase Staff Member

BENQI, the first and largest algorithmic liquidity market protocol on Avalanche, is delighted to announce the appointment of Luke Youngblood as a strategic advisor.

On joining the BENQI advisory board, Luke Youngblood said:

“I have been following BENQI for a while now and it’s great to see them hit milestones previously unheard of. Avalanche in general, and BENQI in particular, is well-positioned to bring the technology that powers DeFi to the traditional finance world. I’m excited to be able to offer my experience and connections on their path to bridge DeFi and institutional networks within a suite of DeFi products.”

As a senior staff software engineer at Coinbase, Youngblood leads the development of the new staking and governance products within Coinbase Cloud. Prior to joining Coinbase in 2019, he was a principal solutions architect at Amazon Web Services.

Youngblood is well-known within the blockchain space for having built out the staking infrastructure for the Tezos network, which helped it become the world’s largest decentralized Proof-of-Stake validator at the time. He has also built the price oracle Harbinger and an algorithmic stablecoin called Kolibri.

BENQI co-founder JD Gagnon said of the appointment:

“Beyond being a visionary, Luke has the track record of overseeing successful delivery of large-scale projects both within and without the blockchain ecosystem. I’m sure Luke’s expertise and network will be a great addition to BENQI.”

With BENQI recently hitting $2 billion in supplied value, Youngblood’s addition comes at an ideal time to help the protocol grow to new heights. Youngblood is passionate about decentralized finance and distributed systems, having spent considerable time within the Avalanche DeFi ecosystem that BENQI is at the forefront of.

Built on Avalanche’s highly scalable network, BENQI aims to bridge DeFi and institutional networks by building a suite of DeFi products, starting with a lending protocol. Through BENQI, Avalanche users will be able to earn interest on their assets, obtain credit through over-collateralized loans and earn QI governance tokens as rewards for providing liquidity on the protocol.

For more information about the project, please contact Dan Mgbor at [email protected] or visit the website.