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Blockchain startup Parity Technologies has hired Zilliqa co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Yaoqi Jia as Head of Engineering for Asia.
Founded by Ethereum co-founder and CTO Dr. Gavin Wood and former Ethereum Foundation Head of Security Dr. Jutta Steiner in 2015, Parity Technologies is an infrastructure and innovation-focused company that aims to enable businesses and organizations to capitalize on blockchain technology. It received a grant of $5 million from the Ethereum Foundation earlier this year.
Jia’s appointment comes ahead of the launch of Polkadot – an interoperability protocol that enables blockchain networks to work together under the protection of shared security. Led by Web3 Foundation, Polkadot aims to solve major scalability issues that hamper blockchain development.
In addition to his research and development contributions to Polkadot, Jia will focus on building the developer ecosystem around Substrate, the highly-advanced blockchain building software development kit (SDK) developed by Parity Technologies.
"I am looking forward to what the next year and beyond holds. Polkadot represents a huge shift in the status of blockchain technology, to pursue the vision of a decentralized Web, and being able to contribute to a company like Parity is a great opportunity - I am looking forward to the challenge,” Jia said.
The company said that he will be “responsible for the management of the sharded blockchain protocol's technical roadmap and development to the adoption of their technology stack and maintaining relations with the project's community and investors.”
Fredrik Harrysson, Parity's CTO, said that Jia’s appointment "will bolster our engineering efforts as we eye Polkadot's launch around the new year,” adding that Jia’s experience working in Asia will bring an important point of view to the firm.
