Stellar Foundation Hires Mozilla Exec as Its New CEO

Longtime Mozilla Chief Operating Officer Denelle Dixon has officially joined the crypto ecosystem.

Dixon has joined the Stellar Development Foundation as CEO of the nonprofit organization, which promotes the top-10 cryptocurrency Lumens (XLM). She succeeded the project's creator, Jed McCaleb, who has moved to the role of chief architect, in which he'll focus on protocol growth and adoption strategies.

In a statement to CoinDesk, Dixon said her goal "will be 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."

She added:

"This is my first role in the crypto space officially. It's awesome and exciting."

McCaleb 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.”

Preaching privacy

Dixon already showed a penchant for cypherpunk innovation when she urged 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.

"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," Dixon wrote in a blog post about her new gig, emphasizing how she wants to help the foundation partner with commercial entities without sacrificing its "core mission."

She joins the crypto foundation at a fortuitous time, the same week the exchange Coinbase added XLM trading to its institutional Coinbase Pro offering. Stellar is also a key partner with IBM, which is working on stablecoin projects running on top of the blockchain.

"Among blockchains, Stellar is uniquely positioned to connect to existing payment infrastructure," Dixon concluded.

Denelle Dixon image via YouTube