Leaders Series: Amanda Gutterman @ ConsenSys
By: Meltem Demirors
Tags: Marketing, Blockchain, Ethereum, Women, Bitcoin

Issue 14— March 16th, 2017

This series highlights the unique stories of leaders from various communities across the growing digital currency and blockchain technology industry. The goal is to showcase the fantastic work these leaders are all doing at different levels of their respective organizations, and to encourage more people at all stages of their careers join the revolution we’re creating, together!

Amanda Gutterman is CMO at ConsenSys

She joined the team six months ago in her first foray into cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech.

What did you do before you joined ConsenSys?

I left Huffington Post in 2015 to pursue a “decentralized” media project and co-founded a company called Slant. What we did was offer anyone the platform to create digital content and immediately monetize their work. It seemed like there weren’t good options for new and emerging journalists other than writing for free on sites like Medium, going through the onerous process of pitching freelance work to major news outlets, or trying to secure a paying reporter job in an industry starved for cash. Slant provided a platform to digital creators to submit their work, get edited and fact checked by a professional editor, and take home 70% of revenue from the advertising we served across the site. We also provided resources to help educate up and coming journalists on how to get traffic to their work and secure more revenue, and ended up attracting thousands of creators, many of them college- and graduate school students.

Our content received nearly 4 million views per month, and with so many creators, we were handling a high volume of micro-payments. The micro-payments required heavy processing fees, which cut into our revenue and meant we weren’t able to offer as much value as we wanted to our creators. I was introduced to blockchain in the context of Slant as the peer to peer solution to our micropayment problem. When I first learned about it, blockchain technology seemed like magic.

How did you get into the blockchain industry?

After Slant, I knew I would try to find a way to deploy my storytelling, media, and marketing background to tell the story of blockchain so more people could understand that magic and dream of ways to apply it to make their own industries and businesses work more efficiently, and hopefully provide a better system for innovators and creatives to be remunerated for their work.

Being in media, what challenges do you think blockchain media is facing today and why?

The problem that I saw for blockchain and media is that blockchain still punches below its weight class, so to speak, in terms of the amount of coverage it gets relative to how transformative it is. That is because the information overhead to make sure journalists and storytellers understand blockchain enough to cover it regularly is so high. By educating a group of journalists, and a group of media consumers, on what the blockchain is and what is has the potential to do, we have the opportunity to facilitate faster adoption of a technology poised to make the world more transparent, inclusive, and just.

What’s been the most interesting experience you’ve had in your role so far?

The most interesting experiences I’ve had so far center around the idea that blockchain is inherently a technology of inclusion, and that by virtue of how it works, it encourages collaboration. The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is a perfect manifestation of that: companies from “suits to hoodies” coming together understanding the importance of the technology, and of working together in an open-source context to create standards that will facilitate even broader adoption. Another example is the increasing involvement of ConsenSys with the United Nations and with governments. Blockchain-based identity offers an opportunity for massive financial inclusion, bringing the 2.5 billion people around the world who are currently “unbanked” as well as refugees into the global economy by radically lowering the barrier to entry for entrepreneurship, allowing more people to capitalize on their human desire to produce.

What motivates you to work on blockchain projects in your role at ConsenSys?

Almost every technology that has pushed humanity forward has allows us to collaborate in larger and larger groups. With the internet and 3.5 billion connected online, we have an unprecedented opportunity to deploy more human creativity than ever before toward common goals. The Web 2.0 that we work on today does not quite allow for that collaboration, with the prevalence of siloed data and other barriers to collaboration. What inspires me about blockchain is that it offers the platform to move beyond those barriers toward truly working together, from a shared and logical source of truth.

As you think about the evolution of the blockchain ecosystem, what is one thing you think the community is missing today?

We need a full-fledged consumer revolution. Enterprises are quickly adopting blockchain and that is fantastic. But we also need consumers to understand what blockchain is, how it will impact them, and to go to their governments and the businesses and services they use and demand it. Businesses and governments could be providing higher quality services to citizens and consumers, and users of the internet could have far more power and control over their information, but the catalyst of that knowledge and that urge to take back power will be an enormous source of change and development.

What aspects of blockchain technology being work on at ConsenSys do you think are exciting in the near term?

I think the technology that is already available and on the market would blow people’s minds if they knew about it. uPort is a great example. uPort is already in alpha, and it provides the identity infrastructure that would unlock the unbanked from the global economy. The blockchain-based systems are already in production or could be in production that would register all meaningful property to the blockchain and allow people to maintain their claims to their property even if they were forced to flee their country.

What challenges do you think still need to be overcome to see global adoption of blockchain technology?

It’s important that a regulatory framework emerges from governments and municipalities that will allow citizens, businesses, and the governments themselves to capitalize on the efficiencies that would come with blockchain adoption. Fortunately, governments and regulators are increasingly part of the conversation. ConsenSys released a whitepaper at the World Government Summit in Dubai providing a roadmap for governments who are interested in implementing blockchain technology. Dubai is a leader in blockchain innovation, and has said that it plans to put all relevant government services on blockchains by 2020.

As a US citizen, I’d like to see the US as a leader in terms of blockchain adoption. A number of US states are already looking into blockchain solutions, fortunately, and my hope is that tech-forward administrations look to blockchains as a solution to provide higher-quality services to citizens.

Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn!

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