Hiero

Richard is Vice President of Engineering at Hashgraph. Before the Hedera ecosystem, he was a Chief Client Architect for the Java platform at Oracle, and an architect for Oracle’s IoT applications. With 20+ years of experience building mission-critical platforms and applications used by millions of people worldwide, his passion is building incredible, scalable, high performance systems. He loves backpacking, camping, and watching his kids grow.

Leemon is the Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Hashgraph. The inventor of the organization’s namesake, the distributed hashgraph consensus algorithm, Leemon co-founded the Hedera network with Mance Harmon. He has two decades of technology and start-up experience, and served as Professor of Computer Science at the US Air Force Academy, as well as holding senior scientist roles in several labs. Leemon received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and has multiple patents and publications in peer-reviewed journals. He has spoken at conferences in computer security, machine learning and mathematics.

Brandon Davenport is Director of Communications at Hgraph, a leading infrastructure provider and technical partner for enterprise, startups and developers. He pairs 15 years of content and brand leadership with hands-on open-source governance, product development, and community building. A major Hedera enthusiast since 2019, Brandon champions open-source and startup collaboration across the entire ecosystem. Based in Ottawa, he enjoys running, playing music, and spending time with his wife and their pets.

Hendrik Ebbers is a member of the Board of Directors of the Eclipse Foundation. He is leading several open-source projects as a member of working groups and committees like Eclipse Adoptium or JakartaEE and actively contributing to even more projects. Hendrik has been a core committer to the consensus node of Hedera for several years.

Michael is the President of Hashgraph Online, a DAO-led and governed open-source organization with the mandate of creating a decentralized, agentic internet. Hashgraph Online has created standards like HCS-1 and HCS-20 which have generated over 28m transactions on Mainnet. Michael brings over a decade of software-development experience to Hedera and contributes regularly to Hedera through community-led HIPs, ideation and feedback within the ecosystem.

Georgi Lazarov is a technical lead at LimeChain with more than 5 years of experience in the blockchain industry. He is a core committer to the tooling around Hiero, like Local Node and JSON-RPC Relay, as well as a contributor to the Block Node and other core components of the Hiero ecosystem.

Stoyan Panayotov is a software architect at Limechain with several years of experience in the blockchain industry consulting various clients - decentralized networks, protocols and dApps. Stoyan has been a core committer to the consensus node of Hedera for several years.

Alex is the Chief Information Officer of Hedera and is charged with the technical operations of the network in close partnership with Hedera's member operators, ensuring the sustainable evolution of capabilities to the network while maintaining its core attributes of speed, fairness, and security. Prior to joining Hedera, Alex was the CIO at Health First, a multi-hospital integrated health system. He previously held several technology leadership positions at Fidelity Investments, with primary responsibility for cybersecurity and standards.

Milan Wiercx van Rhijn is a longtime Hedera builder and leads The HBAR Foundry, a grassroots collective of developers. A multi-time Hedera Hackathon winner, he created projects like Teppo, Nomid, Honeytrail, and The Mouth, and has worked with teams such as Acoer, GoMint, and Earthlings.land. As the elected End User representative on the Hiero Technical Steering Committee, Milan champions transparency, unbiased representation, and user-driven technical direction - with a deep passion for open-source growth through Hiero.