The founder and CEO of COTI is Shahaf Bar-Geffen, a tech entrepreneur from Israel with a background in digital media, online marketing, and blockchain innovation. He has been the public face and strategic leader of COTI since its inception.Before COTI, Shahaf co-founded WEB3, a digital marketing agency that focused on performance-driven campaigns and content delivery. This experience helped shape his understanding of how digital economies scale, knowledge that later played a key role in how COTI’s early architecture was designed.
Bar-Geffen also served as the CEO of Positive Mobile, a mobile advertising platform acquired by IronSource. His entrepreneurial background gave him a front-row seat to the evolution of financial technology and data infrastructure, two key pillars that now underpin COTI’s direction.
He launched COTI in 2017 with the goal of building a scalable, DAG-based payment infrastructure - a Layer 1 called Trustchain. But over time, Shahaf led the protocol’s pivot toward something bigger: confidential computation. Under his leadership, COTI has evolved into COTI V2, a privacy-first Layer 2 built on Ethereum, using garbled circuits to enable encrypted smart contract execution. While other blockchain projects have pivoted out of necessity, Shahaf’s approach has always been to build ahead of the curve. With COTI V2, he’s steering the project into a relatively untapped but increasingly critical sector of Web3: modular privacy infrastructure.
Shahaf is often seen representing COTI at conferences, protocol forums, and media interviews. His consistent public presence and hands-on leadership style have helped the protocol stay relevant through multiple cycles of blockchain innovation.
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