Chia Network announces new CFO as it prepares to go public

The Chia Network has announced veteran finance executive Mitch Edwards as their new chief financial officer.

The company was founded in San Francisco back in 2017, with many of the team coming from digital money, cryptography, and finance backgrounds, previously working for companies such as “BitTorrent, Tradehill, Changetip, and Lightning Labs.”

Edwards has held a number of executive positions in the past at companies such as Overstock and BitTorrent. His role with the Chia Network will be to oversee Chia’s financial planning, risk management, record-keeping, and financial reporting ahead of the company’s Initial Public Offering (IPO).

Chia describe themselves as “a useful, sustainable, and accessible currency for a new age of digital money, and we’ve designed a blockchain network that’s more secure, more geographically dispersed, and less wasteful than traditional cryptocurrencies.”

The new CFO stated: “I believe Chia will become one of the dominant and most widely-used digital currencies in the world. It solves many of the endemic problems of the larger cryptocurrencies.”

The Chia Network is hoping to raise as much as $50 million in their upcoming IPO, allowing up to two million shares of the company to be made available to investors at an opening price of $25 per share. Chia are opting for a seven-day, modified Dutch auction process in which the general public can bid on shares in tandem with institutional investors.

Ryan Singer, chief executive officer of the Chia Network, is highly supportive of the appointment, noting: “Mitch Edwards is the ideal CFO for Chia. He combines experience working with disruptive decentralised technologies with a deep background and credibility on Wall Street.”

Back in September, the Chia Network launched a competition which sought to “create implementations of Chia’s verifiable delay function (VDF) algorithm, where contestants set benchmarks for the algorithm’s speed.”

The quickest party was ‘bulaiden’ with a time of 40.65 seconds. The first and second place prizes were $40,000 and $20,000, respectively.

However, the Chia judges were so impressed with the work of all competitors, the company decided to award $2,000 each to all other teams that submitted an entry.

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