SONM Advisory Board Onboards Digital Economist Paolo Tasca
- Tasca will join the company's board of advisors, providing counsel on business growth.

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Tasca is the founder of the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at the University College London (UCL) and currently holds the role of Executive Director there. Prior to this position, Tasca acted as Lead Economist for digital currencies and peer-to-peer lending at Deutsche Bundesbank, which is located in Frankfurt, Germany. He had also served as an advisor on blockchain technology to the European Union Parliament and the United Nations. Tasca’s research on blockchain has been published in academic journals such as the Harvard Business Review, and he co-authored The FinTech Book: The Financial Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs, and Visionaries with ChainLink’s CEO and co-founder Adam Hayes.

Sergey Ponomarev, SONM Chief Executive Officer, congratulated Tasca on joining the firm: “We are very proud to have Paolo join our Board of Advisors. As a distinguished blockchain expert and advisor to other illustrious blockchain projects, Paolo’s knowledge will help guide the development of SONM’s decentralized computing network and bring us closer to our vision of becoming a secure and cost-effective way to run general purpose computing workloads. His academic connections will also serve an asset to SONM as we seek to develop closer relationships to research and development efforts in the distributed computing space. With his remarkable track record in the blockchain and finance spaces, Paolo is the perfect fit to join our advisory team.”
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Tasca spoke enthusiastically of stepping into his role at SONM: “I am incredibly honored to join the SONM project, one whose innovative vision I strongly believe in. The possibilities unlocked by the connections between billions of people and smart devices will rapidly progress our collective processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge. In this period of extraordinary connectivity and digital transformation, SONM’s distributed cloud technology will allow for the processing of a nearly infinite amount of data streamed from many sensors and connected devices.”
Recently, SONM's Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Initial Coin Offering (ICO) An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a kind of crypto token sale that is used as a method of fundraising, similar to an Initial Public Offering (IPO), in which stocks are sold to raise money for a company.In order to launch an ICO, a company simply needs to create a website, issue a token, and set a time and date for the sale. Investors buy ICO tokens in exchange for another cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Ethereum; after a set amount of time, they receive the tokens they purchased in the sale.Accompanying most major ICOs has been the prevalence of a whitepaper. A whitepaper serves as both a persuasive sales pitch, and in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem and provides a solution. Most marketers relied on whitepapers to educate their respective audience about a particular issue, or explain and promote a particular methodology that an ICO could potentially solve. The information enclosed in whitepapers have historically been met with skepticism.Why ICOs Have Fallen Out of FavorThis is due in large part to the early days of ICOs, as this practice was highly unregulated and extremely risky. Because there were no regulations delineating who could and could not hold an ICO, many bad actors or incompetent technologists saw the practice as an opportunity to grab a lot of fast cash.As a result, many investors have lost quite a lot of money – their tokens were either never returned to them, or the companies who issued the tokens failed within several months of the token’s official launch.Regulators around the world have cracked down on the practice, which has resulted in a slightly “cleaner” ICO space.However, ICOs have garnered a pretty bad reputation and are still regarded as generally untrustworthy. As such, other methods of fundraising, such as Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs) and Security Token Offerings (STOs) have been born. An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a kind of crypto token sale that is used as a method of fundraising, similar to an Initial Public Offering (IPO), in which stocks are sold to raise money for a company.In order to launch an ICO, a company simply needs to create a website, issue a token, and set a time and date for the sale. Investors buy ICO tokens in exchange for another cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Ethereum; after a set amount of time, they receive the tokens they purchased in the sale.Accompanying most major ICOs has been the prevalence of a whitepaper. A whitepaper serves as both a persuasive sales pitch, and in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem and provides a solution. Most marketers relied on whitepapers to educate their respective audience about a particular issue, or explain and promote a particular methodology that an ICO could potentially solve. The information enclosed in whitepapers have historically been met with skepticism.Why ICOs Have Fallen Out of FavorThis is due in large part to the early days of ICOs, as this practice was highly unregulated and extremely risky. Because there were no regulations delineating who could and could not hold an ICO, many bad actors or incompetent technologists saw the practice as an opportunity to grab a lot of fast cash.As a result, many investors have lost quite a lot of money – their tokens were either never returned to them, or the companies who issued the tokens failed within several months of the token’s official launch.Regulators around the world have cracked down on the practice, which has resulted in a slightly “cleaner” ICO space.However, ICOs have garnered a pretty bad reputation and are still regarded as generally untrustworthy. As such, other methods of fundraising, such as Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs) and Security Token Offerings (STOs) have been born. Read this Term) came to a close on July 15 2017, having reached $42 million four days into the event in which 8,774 buyers participated. SNM tokens, which are issued on the Ethereum blockchain, are now available on a number of exchanges such as EthereDelta, HitBTC, Liqui, YoBit, Tidex, and COSS.
Learn how to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum safely with our simple guide!
Tasca is the founder of the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at the University College London (UCL) and currently holds the role of Executive Director there. Prior to this position, Tasca acted as Lead Economist for digital currencies and peer-to-peer lending at Deutsche Bundesbank, which is located in Frankfurt, Germany. He had also served as an advisor on blockchain technology to the European Union Parliament and the United Nations. Tasca’s research on blockchain has been published in academic journals such as the Harvard Business Review, and he co-authored The FinTech Book: The Financial Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs, and Visionaries with ChainLink’s CEO and co-founder Adam Hayes.

Sergey Ponomarev, SONM Chief Executive Officer, congratulated Tasca on joining the firm: “We are very proud to have Paolo join our Board of Advisors. As a distinguished blockchain expert and advisor to other illustrious blockchain projects, Paolo’s knowledge will help guide the development of SONM’s decentralized computing network and bring us closer to our vision of becoming a secure and cost-effective way to run general purpose computing workloads. His academic connections will also serve an asset to SONM as we seek to develop closer relationships to research and development efforts in the distributed computing space. With his remarkable track record in the blockchain and finance spaces, Paolo is the perfect fit to join our advisory team.”
Follow the Blockchain Podcast for exclusive interviews
Tasca spoke enthusiastically of stepping into his role at SONM: “I am incredibly honored to join the SONM project, one whose innovative vision I strongly believe in. The possibilities unlocked by the connections between billions of people and smart devices will rapidly progress our collective processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge. In this period of extraordinary connectivity and digital transformation, SONM’s distributed cloud technology will allow for the processing of a nearly infinite amount of data streamed from many sensors and connected devices.”
Recently, SONM's Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Initial Coin Offering (ICO) An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a kind of crypto token sale that is used as a method of fundraising, similar to an Initial Public Offering (IPO), in which stocks are sold to raise money for a company.In order to launch an ICO, a company simply needs to create a website, issue a token, and set a time and date for the sale. Investors buy ICO tokens in exchange for another cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Ethereum; after a set amount of time, they receive the tokens they purchased in the sale.Accompanying most major ICOs has been the prevalence of a whitepaper. A whitepaper serves as both a persuasive sales pitch, and in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem and provides a solution. Most marketers relied on whitepapers to educate their respective audience about a particular issue, or explain and promote a particular methodology that an ICO could potentially solve. The information enclosed in whitepapers have historically been met with skepticism.Why ICOs Have Fallen Out of FavorThis is due in large part to the early days of ICOs, as this practice was highly unregulated and extremely risky. Because there were no regulations delineating who could and could not hold an ICO, many bad actors or incompetent technologists saw the practice as an opportunity to grab a lot of fast cash.As a result, many investors have lost quite a lot of money – their tokens were either never returned to them, or the companies who issued the tokens failed within several months of the token’s official launch.Regulators around the world have cracked down on the practice, which has resulted in a slightly “cleaner” ICO space.However, ICOs have garnered a pretty bad reputation and are still regarded as generally untrustworthy. As such, other methods of fundraising, such as Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs) and Security Token Offerings (STOs) have been born. An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a kind of crypto token sale that is used as a method of fundraising, similar to an Initial Public Offering (IPO), in which stocks are sold to raise money for a company.In order to launch an ICO, a company simply needs to create a website, issue a token, and set a time and date for the sale. Investors buy ICO tokens in exchange for another cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Ethereum; after a set amount of time, they receive the tokens they purchased in the sale.Accompanying most major ICOs has been the prevalence of a whitepaper. A whitepaper serves as both a persuasive sales pitch, and in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem and provides a solution. Most marketers relied on whitepapers to educate their respective audience about a particular issue, or explain and promote a particular methodology that an ICO could potentially solve. The information enclosed in whitepapers have historically been met with skepticism.Why ICOs Have Fallen Out of FavorThis is due in large part to the early days of ICOs, as this practice was highly unregulated and extremely risky. Because there were no regulations delineating who could and could not hold an ICO, many bad actors or incompetent technologists saw the practice as an opportunity to grab a lot of fast cash.As a result, many investors have lost quite a lot of money – their tokens were either never returned to them, or the companies who issued the tokens failed within several months of the token’s official launch.Regulators around the world have cracked down on the practice, which has resulted in a slightly “cleaner” ICO space.However, ICOs have garnered a pretty bad reputation and are still regarded as generally untrustworthy. As such, other methods of fundraising, such as Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs) and Security Token Offerings (STOs) have been born. Read this Term) came to a close on July 15 2017, having reached $42 million four days into the event in which 8,774 buyers participated. SNM tokens, which are issued on the Ethereum blockchain, are now available on a number of exchanges such as EthereDelta, HitBTC, Liqui, YoBit, Tidex, and COSS.