CoinMarketCap’s chief strategy officer and acting CEO Carylyne Chan is leaving the well-known crypto market data site — together with two of her colleagues, Jeremy Seow and Spencer Yang.
Chan, who has worked at CMC since January 2018, publicly announced her departure on Aug. 31. She had stepped in as interim CEO shortly after CMC was acquired by Binance in April of this year.
Seow, for his part, has been CMC’s vice president of products since June 2019, the same month that Yang joined as vice president of operations, growth and revenue.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Chan said that she is leaving the firm with the hope that CMC will assume a more prominent role in cryptocurrency education. A cornerstone of the strategy she laid out for the near feature was “CMC Alexandria” — a new educational section of CMC that aims to orient newcomers to cryptocurrency.
Chan sketched out her vision of cryptocurrency as a cooperative and community-led “revolution,” which still requires significant collective efforts before it can break through and “cross the chasm” to widespread use.
“Apart from shedding light on the complicated inner workings of crypto, I believe that there is also a lot more that we need to do to make the actual use of the technology easier. We’ve all known for a while that better user experiences and simplified interfaces and products will be key to ramping up adoption of crypto,” Chan said.
In her departure letter to the CMC community, Chan noted that she had personally hired and trained over a quarter of CMC’s almost-50 person team. During her tenure, she played a prominent part in the site’s push to elicit more transparent disclosures and accountability from projects in the cryptocurrency space.
This included the Data Accountability & Transparency Alliance and the introduction of new metrics and scores to improve the integrity of data and volume reporting on the site.
In spring 2019, CMC launched two cryptocurrency benchmark indices on Nasdaq, Bloomberg, and Refinitiv (Thomson Reuters) as part of the site’s efforts to bring data on cryptocurrency assets to “mainstream” platforms.
“Over time, I hope that we address the misconceptions that the public may have about the crypto space,” said Chan. “This will happen over time, as the utility of various crypto products, and crypto-based derivatives gain prominence, and show their true potential in the wider economy.”
Cointelegraph reached out to CoinMarketCap to enquire into who would be replacing the departing executives. In response, a representative wrote that the site will be “sharing more updates soon.”