The Hedera Governing Council has appointed two new members to the executive team. The council is a consortium of leading organizations that operate the open source, hashgraph-powered, carbon-negative Hedera network for Web3 applications. Hedera said that the appointments come after it decentralized earlier this year, a move in which the product, engineering, and marketing departments of Hedera spun off into Swirlds Labs.

Hedera said that tech and foreign policy expert Nilmini Rubin joins Hedera as chief of staff and head of global policy, as the council expands its focus on public policy engagement. Betse Botaitis joins the Hedera team as chief financial officer. She is a global finance executive, who has extensive experience in finance strategy in both the distributed ledger technology space and TradFi.

“Over the past year or so, we’ve seen significant maturation of the Hedera ecosystem, as more entities emerge and work independently to accelerate the development and utilization of Web3 capabilities uniquely enabled by the enterprise-operated Hedera network,” Hedera Chair Brett McDowell said in a statement. “This momentum is reflected in the quality of these new executive leaders who were attracted by the opportunity to collaborate with our Council members and make meaningful contributions in the increasingly critical areas of treasury governance and public policy engagement.”

Hedera said that Rubin previously contributed to the global policy team at Meta, led the international energy division of Tetra Tech and lobbied on cybersecurity for the Information Technology Industry Council. Her government experience includes serving as the director for international finance at the National Security Council, and as a senior aide at both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Hedera said.

“Hedera’s commitment to environmental sustainability and potential to enable economic growth creates exciting public policy opportunities. I’m looking forward to further guiding Hedera’s strategy for global policy to support Hedera’s positive impact on the world and collaborate with policymakers to execute on shared goals such as consumer protection and market integrity,” Rubin said in a statement.

Botaitis is an internationally known strategist and fintech executive with nearly two decades of experience ranging from large financial institutions to blockchain and cryptocurrency startups, Hedera said in a statement.

In her new role, Botaitis acts as both the CFO and the treasurer of Hedera, the company said.

Before coming to Hedera, Botaitis held various senior positions at renowned and leading-edge companies including Uplift (a leading Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) player in travel), Kueski (Mexico’s largest BNPL), Lending Club, and Citigroup, Hedera said.

While at Citigroup, Botaitis became an expert on financial inclusion and fintech, and was the global director of finance and operations for the departments of Community Development and Microfinance (renamed Financial Inclusion), which funded many programs in partnership with NGOs, CDFIs, and other community-based organizations.

Eventually, Botaitis became CFO and co-founder of AIKON, a startup enabling the first DLT-based API marketplace to provide equal opportunity to software developers across the globe, giving them a chance to be paid fairly for their work.

“Even amid challenging market conditions, Hedera has maintained a laser-sharp focus on innovating and building out its ecosystem with great integrity and transparency, and is seeing incredible traction for real-world use cases,” Botaitis said in a statement. “I’ve long been a champion of the power of distributed ledger technology for financial inclusion and to facilitate greater equality. Hedera is a network that is well-aligned with these values, prioritizing environmental sustainability and enabling impactful use cases for financial inclusion due to its low transaction costs.”

With the Hedera Governing Council now focused primarily on governing the open-source Hedera network and its treasury, Hedera said these new roles will be integral to ensuring quality stewardship of the platform in the rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.

The Hedera network is an innovative, sustainable public ledger for the decentralized economy, the company said. Its robust ecosystem is built by a global community, on a network governed by a diverse council of industry-leading organizations, including abrdn, Avery Dennison, Boeing, Chainlink Labs, DBS Bank, Dentons, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, EDF (Électricité de France), eftpos, FIS (WorldPay), Google, IBM, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), LG Electronics, The London School of Economics (LSE), Magalu, Nomura Holdings, ServiceNow, Shinhan Bank, Standard Bank Group, Swirlds, Tata Communications, Ubisoft, University College London (UCL), Wipro, and Zain Group.

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