DeFi start-up Nova Finance appoints COO

Savings and Investment

The Edinburgh-founded crypto start-up has appointed Zaahirah Adam as its first-ever chief operating officer.

Image source: Zaahirah Adam

DeFi start-up Nova Finance has appointed Zaahirah Adam as its first chief operations officer. 

Nova, founded in 2017, offers an investment solution based on the Solana blockchain, which can be used for smart contracts and offers an alternative to the Ethereum network.

Their platform allows users to have their portfolio automatically rebalanced, and apparently offers investment strategies such as dollar cost averaging and profit calls.

The firm’s protocol is currently undergoing beta testing with a full public launch expected at an undisclosed date. 

Prior to joining Nova, Ms Adam served as chief of staff at embedded finance platform Liberis and was previously  head of strategy and execution at Capita Pensions

In her new role, the executive will be responsible for the overall business operations of the company, and the finance function as well as for developing and executing Nova’s strategic roadmap.

Tom Sichel, co-founder of Nova Finance highlighted that a key part of Zaahirah’s role will be to translate business priorities into roadmaps for the development team, as well to prioritise technical work and to support on the product side “by translating user feedback and requirements into tech development tools”.

The appointment comes as Nova is fresh off the back of a very $3m funding round in October 2021,  which included participation from Solana, Rarestone, Animoca Brands and Morningstar Ventures.

This is likely not the last DeFi funding round we’ll see this year, the space is booming according to the research, despite the variety of high-profile cyberattacks in the sector that have been seen in sector.

Over 1,139 DeFi and Web3-related deals have been struck this year according to figures from CoinTelegraph, a significant rise from the 1,348 made in 2021.